Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 90
ISBN: 9781781727423
Publication date: April 15, 2024
Price: £10.99
“This wide-ranging collection sees Curtis writing at the height of his powers and confirms his position as one of Wales’s leading poets.” – Neil Leadbeater, Write Out Loud
Aldous Huxley and his wife Laura flee the Hollywood Hills as an all-consuming wildfire destroys one of the most expensive areas of Los Angeles. It is 1961. Leaving the Hollywood Hills, what of their lives can they save? A Welsh artist settled in the USA remembers his home back in Swansea. His father has hung a Calennig token from the light in the front room. What does that mean?
In his first poetry collection since From the Fortunate Isles: New & Selected Poems, Tony Curtis brings together poems that range from California to Carmarthen, Medieval Ireland to present-day Wales; there are lyrical poems and longer dramatic monologues. His subjects range from Roger Bannister to Muhammed Ali, from Billie Holiday to Claude Debussy. There is a moving sequence written for the 50th anniversary of the Aberfan disaster, in response to the photographs of Chuck Rapport.
In his seventh decade, Tony Curtis has published “a genre-defying” first novel – Darkness in the City of Light, which was short-listed for the Society of Authors Paul Torday Prize, and he has written a second. His work, in poetry and fiction, continues to cross genres, to explore and define the times in which we live. In the writing there is everything he would wish to save from the fire, all the tokens he will need.
Tony Curtis
Poet, critic, essayist, expert on Welsh Art, Tony Curtis was born in Carmarthen in West Wales in 1946. He studied at Swansea University and Goddard College, Vermont. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including his latest: From the Fortunate Isles: New and Selected Poems. He has also written volumes of critical work on poets and artists and edited popular anthologies of poetry. He is Emeritus Professor of Poetry at the University of South Wales, where he established and was Director of the MPhil in Writing for many years. He has been elected to the Royal Society of Literature and has toured widely reading his poetry to international audiences.
“Curtis’s poems are historical, biographical and cordial, but they are never self-referentially confessional; at the same time, they bear witness to life’s joys and, towards the end of the collection, its touching intimations of mortality… they are still emblems, in content at least, of contemporary Welsh poetry’s generational vigour, here represented in work of depth, artistry, and sweeping breadth.”
Nigel Jarratt, ACUMEN
“Tony Curtis, one of Wales’s leading poets, has the knack of contracting the earth-bound to the sublime.”
Dannie Abse
“His words break through walls and cross boundaries not in an effort to reach a final destination, but in an attempt to learn the necessary arts of modern survival.”
Professor M. Wynn Thomas
“The poems reverberate with present, sensuous experiences, but beyond their immediacy there is a deep hinterland of public and private histories, grief and delight.”
Helen Dunmore
