TRIBUTES were paid to former Gazette deputy editor, Barry MacSweeney, during his funeral service on Tyneside.
Family and friends gathered at John Knox Church, West Denton, Newcastle, to pay their last respects to the 51-year-old journalist and respected poet, who died last week.
Barry MacSweeney's journalistic career started as a teenage cub reporter for t
he Evening Chronicle, followed by stints as both news editor and crime reporter on newspapers throughout the UK.
He worked as both shipping correspondent and deputy editor for the Shields Gazette, before leaving to take up a freelance career in the early 1990s.
A respected poet for more than 30 years, Barry was nominated for the Chair in Poetry at Oxford as a 19-year-old by Hutchinson, the publishers of his first poetry collection, The Boy From the Green Cabaret Tells of His Mother (1968).
There followed a string of highly-regarded books and regular readings in the UK, Europe and the USA.
Leading poet and Cambridge University academic, Jeremy Prynne, a lifelong friend, spoke movingly at the service about Barry's writing and life.
He called his friend "a complete original," and predicted his literary reputation would continue to grow in years to come.
The service included the hymns Jerusalem, When I Survey the Wondrous Cross, How Great Thou Art, and a reading from St Luke's Gospel.
Mourners left the church to the strains of Slow Train Coming, a religious song by Bob Dylan, whose work Barry loved.
A memorial reading to celebrate Barry's life will be held later this year.
