AFTER ruling the 1960s as the great poet of the folk, protest and rock music mediums, Bob Dylan began to slip from mass adulation with albums like ‘Nashville Skyline’ and ‘New Morning’ indulging a passion for country music and what we would now call Americana, writes Barry Jones.

But in 1974 he re-emerged with one of his most iconic albums ever ‘Blood on the Tracks’, with its 10 songs of heartache, deception, anger, poignant regret and loneliness, with some of his greatest lyrics and songs including ‘Tangled Up in Blue’, ‘Simple Twist of Fate’, ‘Idiot Wind’, and ‘Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts’.

For Nic Outterside ‘Blood on the Tracks’ has remained his “lyrical and poetic touchstone” among the works of the man born Robert Allen Zimmerman that have “bestowed the soundtrack to my life”

And now it becomes the template for his own album of 10 poems that are “my life and my blood”, comprising “just poetry, song inspiration and words”.

Regarding the Dylan album as “the greatest LP of all time”, his responses overall have a wistful feeling tinged with sadness.

“Redemption” is probably his finest poem here but throughout the collection he uses echoes of Dylan songs and imagery, even entire lines and not just from ‘Blood on the Tracks’, including "The undertaker blew a hollow horn", "howling wind", "Miss Lonely" and "How did we meet and where do we go".

After years as an award winning newspaper journalist, including a spell as deputy editor of the County Times, Nic Outterside left to be a full time autor and publisher.

He has written and compiled a number of books of poetry and plans to publish his autobiography this autumn tracing his battles against domestic upheaval, cancer, bankruptcy, and alcoholism, as well as happier and more positive times with amusing anecdotes from his years in newspaper journalism.