For Dubliners of a certain vintage, poet Pat Ingoldsby was as much a part of the Dublin streetscape as Arthur Fields, the street photographer on O’Connell Bridge, had been for a previous generation. And in many ways they followed the same path: taking snapshots of the life around them.

After leaving a successful career in broadcasting, Ingoldsby devoted himself to poetry, publishing it himself and selling it to people on the street for 20 years from the mid-1990s onwards, starting at North Earl Street, and latterly in Westmoreland Street. You would often see him in conversation with people, a friend and father confessor to Dubliners of all stripes. But while he was a familiar sight to passersby, he was also looking at them, as this entertaining and moving selection shows.

He brought poetry to the people, but also brought the people into the poetry. Seated in his spot, he was a close observer of the life around him, particularly the people chewed up and spat out by the then rampant Celtic Tiger, the homeless and the drug addicts, the beggars and child street musicians, the disappearing street traders.

The scourge of drugs in Dublin has rarely been so vividly described. One poem entitled Two Steps Ahead: “I watched the wasted pair of them/making their pricked and punctured way/down North Earl Street/and an open grave was moving along in front.”

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People told him their stories, which found their ways into these poems, creating a broad and often moving, sometimes shocking, portrait of what life was like for the poor on the Dublin street. He sees the city changing all round him, a process wryly captured by an old Dub who tells him: “You know the way you see tables and chairs/on the path outside a restaurant ... /when we were small, that was an eviction.”

[ Pat Ingoldsby obituary: Ringmaster of a surreal circus that sprang fully formed from his own imaginationOpens in new window ]

In one poem a small boy rushes up to him and asks, to Pat’s delight: “Are you a pirate?” He certainly was a pirate of poetry, and this beautifully produced and illustrated book is a monument to him. Unfortunately, his poems are still all too topical.

Michael O’Loughlin is a poet and author