In the poetry of Wales Tony Curtis is a formidable figure. He has published more than twenty books and a host of pamphlets. He has won a string of significant prizes and was created the nation’s first Professor of Poetry in 1994. He strides through the Welsh literary world like no other. Now R.S. has died he may well be Wales’s answer to Simon Armitage, to Paul Muldoon, and to Don Patterson. ‘This position he has gained,’ as the critic Sam Adams once put it, ‘by working at it’.
     Not that his Welsh identity is the first thing you encounter, neither in his verse nor in the man. In 1974, the year when he was one of the three winners of the Welsh Arts Council’s ground-breaking Young Anglo-Welsh Poets competition he simultaneously appeared alongside Martin Bell, Muriel Berry, Douglas Dunn and Philip Larkin as one of the Yorkshire Arts Association’s Five Yorkshire Poets. T.C. the shape shifter with the name of a star. To celebrate this fog John Tripp wrote a poem about the other Tony Curtis, the film star, getting his books onto the poetry shelves of the new Oriel bookshop. To complete the confusion, an Irish poet using the same name then appeared on the literary scene and began working the UK poetry patch. T.C. was undaunted. He brought out his first full length collection, Album (1974), and, ignoring all misperception, has never looked back.
     His latest collection, From the Fortunate Isles, a mix of new and selected poetry, offers the Curtis legacy as chosen by the poet. T.C. is now in his seventies and has been producing significant verse for more than five decades. The selection (his third so far) crams his achievement into 240 pages offering the reader no notes, entrées, descriptions, explanations or justifications. The best you’ll get is the occasional dedication. If you want to know the period being reported on, or the subject being illuminated then you’ll need to work it out for yourself.
     Tracking T.C.’s literary evolution is difficult. His life’s work presents a dense and often multifaceted surface. Curtis does not comes from the Frank O’Hara school of conversational verse of Ginsberg’s first thoughts best thoughts academy. He is no edge pusher preferring older, more tried and trusted forms. If he has an affinity with anyone then it is with poets such as the complex and allusive Geoffrey Hill or the controlled and confessional Robert Lowell.
     Despite years of travelling back and forth to America, studying for a degree at Vermont, and immersing himself in that transatlantic culture there’s little overt trace in his work. It is also difficult to place him in the Anglo-Welsh canon. He lacks the social concern of Robert Minhinnick and Nigel Jenkins, avoids the political flash of Mike Jenkins, and rarely displays the comfortable Welsh accessibility you get, for example, in the work of Gillian Clarke. T.C. is happier, I suggest, to be part of the British mainstream.
     His obvious influences – the poets he clearly admires enough to have had a visible impact on his own verse – are fewer than might be expected. One is Seamus Heaney, whom T.C. eloquently champions in the final poem of the collection. This is ‘Seamus on the Tube’, which presents the reader with a portrait of T.C. as a ‘crazt old man mouthing words’ while travelling on the Northern Line and then not so silently ‘appearing to sing’ out the lines of Heaney’s Poem on the Underground, ‘The Railway Children’.
     Another is his friend John Tripp whose influence surfaces periodically as does that of his mentor, the late Dannie Abse. Both poets are treated to fine memorial pieces. Dannie in the superb tightly controlled ‘Birthday Poem for Dannie Abse at Ninety’ and John Tripp in the much earlier and looser (but only slightly) ‘Thoughts from the Holiday Inn’. This latter piece most entertainingly captures the whole alcohol-drenched, mid-life crisis, culturally uncertain, old-fashioned 1980s world that Tripp inhabited.
     The big themes, however, the ones T.C. returns to time and again in a lifetime’s work, are art, war and family. The family pieces, and there are many, often invoke a history farming cattle and potatoes in safe and English-speaking South Pembrokeshire. Family are present in his work from the outset. His mother in the wartime land army, his children learning to swim in the 1970s, his grandmother at her house in Carmarthen, and then poem after poem about his father whose ashes get shaken from the headland despite his mother’s insistence that ‘he was never a man for the sea’.
     In an arts world where the visual should mix far more readily with the literary than it ever actually does T.C. is a tireless campaigner. For a golf-playing anti-bohemian he counts an amazing number of painters as personal friends. His poetry consistently rejoices in and reacts to their work. Sometimes this is in direct collaboration, as with the American collagist John Digby and the joint The Arches project from 1998. At others it is simply the poet in awe of painterly wonder as with his pieces in reaction to the work of Andrew Wyeth or in admiration of that of John Knapp Fisher, Ernest Zobole, Hans Richter, Canaletto, and Gwen John.
     His war poetry, for which he is probably best known, ranges over more than two hundred years of human conflict. T.C.’s approach is to recall small detail and to do this often by adopting a persona of someone involved. He is Richard Beattie-Seaman, the Brit turned Nazi, who died at the wheels of his Merc in the 1939 Belgian Grand Prix. He is the painter William Orpen at the Somme. And most memorably in ‘Soup’, he is a Jewish prisoner in revolt at a concentration camp.
     As a poet Tony Curtis’ impact on the wider literary world should not be underestimated. Wales needs literary ambassadors, writers whose work repays constant rereading and with reputation enough to surface high over today’s omnipresent dross of poetic overproduction. T.C. is one of those for sure and, eighth decade or not, he hasn’t finished yet.