Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 85
ISBN: 9781854110053
Publication date: February 23, 1995
Price: £9.95
The Last Candles confirms Tony Curtis’s stature as a poet. In it he develops his prize-winning narrative style, bringing a vast range of contemporary and historical perspectives into play in poems private and public about the two world wars and the revolutions in Russia and the Empire. There are poems, too, about visual art, a preoccupation of the author, with painting, sculpture and photography all prominent. And there are intimate poems about family and friends, including the much admired ‘Thoughts from the Holiday Inn’, his elegy for John Tripp which also traces the changing face of society in Wales.
Throughout, these poems show the formal control, keen observation and honesty of feeling which mark Curtis as such “an interesting and unpredictable poet” – PN Review. The Last Candles is Tony Curtis’s fourth full collection, the first since his successful Selected Poems (1986), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
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.
an interesting and unpredictable poet
PN Review
