It’s a big night in Belfast on Monday as the Van Morrison Lyrics show hits town – fittingly enough at the Lyric.

In Lit Up Inside: the Selected Lyrics, with a foreword by Ian Rankin – the Rebus writer who has been joining Van on stage for these shows already in London and Dublin along with the great Belfast poet Michael Longley (No Continuing City) and the book’s editor academic Dr Eamonn Hughes – one-third of the singer/songwriter’s 50-year career output is represented.

In Hughes’ introduction playwright Stewart Parker’s observation is cited to back up the idea that Morrison like any significant writer has created his own world, in Morrison’s case, Hughes writes, “a world of back streets and mystic avenues; memories of childhood wonder and of adult work suffuse it,” Belfast a “site of the imagination.”

That site of the imagination embraced Morrison’s school days last year with the nostalgic Orangefield School shows and before that an already fabled Harp bar show on New Year’s Eve 2013 in front of a tiny audience just after he was made freeman of the city of Belfast.

Hughes says the collection aims to be representative bookended by visions of Belfast in different guises beginning with ‘The Story of Them’ and Morrison’s early days in a city Hughes says was “mapped by music.” And in Lit Up Inside Morrison manages to harness the prosaic and the profound, the former in ‘Saint Dominic’s Preview’ with its supermarket in the rain; the complex presence of ‘warm love’ on the song of the same name in the latter sense. You can feel the emotion too and practically taste the salt in the rhymes of ‘Cul-de-Sac.’

Sold out even though the ticket prices for Monday are pretty hefty there is a waiting list for returns so it’s worth checking. Van Morrison with Them above