We meet up with Huddersfield poet Adam Strickson at Bradford's Theatre In The Mill where he is getting ready for the stage launch of his new poetry book. It's January in Bradford and outside the snow is falling.

Adam reads his poem, Where are we? and suddenly we are transported to Asia but this is no golden dream. The rug maker works in a "dark hut in a flat village" - he is "aged nine and three quarters." The "Indian rug surprised by snow" hangs on Adam's washing line in Meltham.

Adam Strickson reads his poems

He explains his poems reflect many different realities: "I have travelled and worked in Asia, particularly in Bangladesh and in India, and it's the reality around us. The house I lived in at Meltham used to be right next to the moors so there were no back windows or back doors because of the fierceness of the weather and my one piece of washing was the Indian rug which probably came from somewhere like IKEA.

"In my collection there are many different kinds of realities. There are stories about actually being in Bangladesh in some remote parts and poems like this which bring them together with my life in West Yorkshire.

He says much of his work is based on personal experience: "It comes from meeting people. I have close links to British Asians here but also friends in Bangladesh and when I look back the poems are nearly all to do with incidents in their lives or their feelings or my reaction to them - how they've changed my life or my perceptions in a small way. The first section comes from meetings with people in West Yorkshire, Oldham and Burnley and touches on the riots and disturbances and my friends' reaction to them and also the relationship to Islam but again I've tried to keep some humour in there as well although it's quite a serious section."

Childhood and family life provide a starting-point for some of his poems: "There's a section about early life. I was brought up in the Cotswolds in a small village where you never saw an Asian face or a black face so it's been quite an unusual journey for me to look back and see what was there in childhood…Then there are poems about family because I write poems for special occasions like a teenage birthday or a letter for my daughter when she went to university. And about ancestors, about where I come from, really."

But Adam's own personal experiences in Huddersfield have taken his poetry further afield - his encounters with Kurdish people there have provided him with some close friendships.

The book ends with Other People, Other Lives - "From an old farmer in the Cotswolds to an English lady who is living and working as a cleaner in a Spanish village, supporting Malaga football team after she supported Crewe for many years so it's just a ragbag of people I've met in different places."

Adam talks about his journey to becoming a published poet: "I probably started like everybody else does who says they are a writer when I was quite young because I also thought of myself as a writer with a very small 'w'. I did write at school and I wrote quite a lot of poetry right up to the age of about 24 or 25 but then I just thought it was all dreadful so I ditched most of it, although I carried on working in theatre and writing scenarios and songs. I didn't start writing seriously as a writer until 1997 although the strand hadn't quite disappeared."

In fact Adam was very busy in these intervening years working in community theatre. In 1988 he started to work as a story teller and visual artist with the Bangladeshi community in Maningham. He says: "I found a very alive village culture in the middle of Bradford which is, of course, a city. I got very fascinated by this and at the same time began to make Bangladeshi friends, and it began a trail I followed for a few years." In 1989 he set up Chol Theatre whose first project 'The Seashore Of Worlds' was based on interviews with Bangladeshi women in Huddersfield.

Adam was Artistic Director of Chol for 13 years but left to concentrate on a career as a freelance writer: "I'd found more and more demand, particularly for multicultural playwriting." He has now written for quite a few companies and his play for Peshkar, 'The Beautiful Violin,' was performed in English, Bengali and Hindi. Now Adam is writing the opening production for the first-purpose built youth theatre in the country which is taking shape over the Pennines in Burnley.

He will be accompanied at his book launch by folk musician Chris Coe from Ripponden as well as Inder Goldfinger and Avtar Lohta on tabla and dilrub. Adam says: "I come from a family of musicians... A lot of my plays have music and it seemed an obvious thing for the poetry launch to include some of those musicians I have worked with in the theatre. Some of the music will accompany the poems but mostly the poems and the music will be performed separately. Some of it comes from the same roots."

Before we go back out into te snow Adam reads us another of his poems, The lotus of Safeera wakes and awakes. This is based on the life story of a woman who lives in Ravensthorpe, Huddersfield: "At fifteen, she was the school's 'agony aunt', anonymously answering tear splashed scrawls with her first poems, which were loving stirred casseroles of emotion." We definitely think we'll be back for a second helping.

Adam launches his poetry collection at the Theatre In The Mill at the University of Bradford on Saturday 29th January at 7.30pm. An Indian Rug Surprised By Snow, is published by Wrecking Ball Press.