NEXT week sees the launch of RG Gregory's poem Imperfect Eden, a poem celebrating the author's early life in Southampton and evoking southern working-class life in the 1930s.

On September 29, 1984, Albert Gregory (who started life as a stevedore in Southampton docks and finished as a superintendent) celebrated his 90th birthday in the company of four of his five children. The fifth, RG Gregory, was abroad at the time.

This absence provided the impetus for a poem that eventually took sixteen years and eight months to write and comprised a total of 10,353 lines (1479 stanzas of rhyme-royal - one of the oldest forms of English poetry). It began as a poem about the relationship between the poet and his father, but grew to encompass the poet's experience of Southampton in those pre-war years.

Extracts will be read by a number of readers at the launch at Taun-ton's College, Hill Lane, Southampton, at 7.30pm on April 29.