On Monday, David Tipton jets out to Lima to attend a three-day World Conference of Poets.

What's extraordinary, however, is that the editor of Bradford's Redbeck Press will be the ONLY British poet among the 26 invited poets from Greece to the Americas, who will be giving papers and reading samples of their own work in Peru's capital city.

Eat your heart out Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Tony Harrison.

Tipton, who has translated poems by the acclaimed Peruvian poets Antonio Cisneros and Jos Watanabe, believes the writers Ruth Fainlight and Alan Silletoe recommended him for the all-expenses-paid conference. There and back entails about 15,000 miles of air travel. When he spoke to me in the kitchen of his terraced house in Frizinghall, he was still in a state of shocked but delighted surprise.

"This is a great honour," I said to him.

"Is it? Yes, I suppose it is," he replied. "I hadn't thought of it like that."

Only the week before he had learned that the Spirit of Bradford poetry anthology, which he had put together with best-selling Bradford writer Nick Toczek, had won the £2,000 runners-up prize in a national competition - the Raymond Williams Community Publishing Prize for 1998.

Spirit of Bradford, published just in time for Bradford's Centenary, has sold about 600 copies to date. Not bad for a volume containing poems by many 'unknowns', and retailing at £9.

"The idea came from Jane Ramsden, a partner in Redbeck Press, who now lives with me. A lot of the poems were there already. I got Nick Toczek to help me edit it because he knew performance poets like Seething Wells and Wild Willi Beckett. Others came through advertising at the Central Library. "I thought we had the makings of a brilliant anthology, brilliant for the locality. As far as I know it's the only anthology book of Bradford poetry, certainly in the past 50 years if not longer. It will certainly become a collector's item," he predicted.

Last year the University of Salzburg published his collected poems, Amulet Against the Evil Eye, a hugely enjoyable book which I read through in less than a day. Using the first and second person, Tipton describes, recounts and meditates upon a galaxy of personal and professional experiences in Bradford and abroad.

He was born and brought up in Birmingham, served two years in the Army (he wanted to fight in Korea but was sent to Malaya), studied at Essex University, taught for eight years in Argentina and Peru, brought up three young children on his own after his first wife died in Argentina, and in the last 25 years has published about 80 'slim volumes' - first in Sheffield and from 1978 in Bradford. His own poetry and prose has been marketable since 1960.

Tipton's collected poems reveal a sensibility unafraid of historical detail or literary coincidence, with a painter's eye for colour and form (his daughter Sara Jane Tipton is an artist and illustrator). He's a liberal Romantic too, but this doesn't prevent him from taking up unexpected positions on the Falklands War, the Gulf War, and militant Islam. His poems about betting on the horses are a treat, full of observations that are funny and sadly shrewd.

His sexual encounters, in and out of marriage, are dealt with head-on. The down-to-earth directness of his reporting has been nourished by the uncompromisingly revelatory style of that indefatigable self-chronicler, the late Charles Bukowski.

But whereas toughly-tender Bukowski is unapologetic, Tipton's liberal conscience sometimes causes him to question his own motives and doubt the things he cherishes. In this respect he reminds me of the Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough, who questioned the truth of reality perceived through the senses - Rousseau's revolutionary assertion.

As a poetry editor, he concentrates on Northern writers. "My first Press, Rivelin, was started in 1974 partly because of my disgust with the London literary scene." A travel book and a novel were taken up and then inexplicably dropped by two London publishers.

"Most writers will tell you similar kinds of stories. The best writers are in the North of England: I am a bit prejudiced that way," he added with a knowing laugh.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.