Poetry review – LEAVING THE HILLS: Stuart Henson reviews Tony Curtis’s latest collection and reflects on many years of thoughtful, well-observed poetry
Leaving the Hills
Tony Curtis
Seren
ISBN 978-1-78172-742-3
£10.99
It’s forty years since I last reviewed a book by Tony Curtis—a slim volume from Poetry Wales Press entitled Letting Go. My copy still retains a slip with a note in Howard Sergeant’s precise hand apologising for the lack of space available—two books in 400 words. I can’t remember who the other poet was. A lot of water has flowed under the Towy Bridge since then. (The home computer was in its infancy. The first, brick-sized, mobile phones were still two years away.) And in that gap of time Poetry Wales Press has morphed into Seren, reviews are seldom commissioned by post, the Creative Writing industry has burgeoned… Don’t get me going! I dread to think what youthful misjudgements I may have visited on those two unsuspecting volumes. We change. We grow wiser—we hope. And over the four decades what’s au courant in poetry has changed too. Tony Curtis’s work in many ways provides the perfect glass through which to examine what we valued—what we still value—in poetry, and why it remains important.
In an age when the poet’s persona is often foregrounded, it’s easy to forget that despite the influence of Plath, Moore and Lowell and the colossal magnetism of the then poet laureate, the mainstream in the last decades of the last century was dominated by attentive observation: the poet as disinterested recorder, interpreter, storyteller, raconteur… Of course, that’s to over-simplify, and you can no doubt cite any number of exceptions, but certainly in Letting Go there were poems of family life, poems about photographs, poems about Wyeth and Chagall, a dead rabbit, a Vietnam veteran, the shooting of John Lennon… all recorded with intelligence and precision and a belief in the power of truth-in-language. And what we find in Leaving the Hills is not so radically different. Times have moved on but Tony Curtis’s ‘core values’ remain constant. “Flying the Lanner”, for instance, is as lovingly and closely observed as any scene from Ken Loach’s Kes, and although his “Bosherston Pike”, ‘Cruising the pools like a U-boat in the shadows’, may not have the sonorousness of Hughes’s, it’d put up as good a fight for a place in any fisherman’s anthology.
The collection’s prime virtue, as you might expect, is its ability to give a local habitation and a name to the timeless, universal things that add up to human life. “Climbing the Overhang” is a good exemplar. It’s a poem about the ‘repurposed’ Eglwys Dewi Sant in Carmarthen, sold off to become a ‘climbing and bouldering centre’:
… The pews are plastered by pigeons,
The font a dry stone, the pulpit silent and soiled.
The wooden list of the Great War’s dead
And the marble plaques to the crachach – Williamses, Pictons,
Davieses – fade back into the dusty shade.
In the churchyard, to the rear and towards the town,
Seven war graves decline, their greying Portland
Headstones sinking into a maze of barbed brambles:
We shall strain to remember them.
Your grandmother and grandfather’s marble chips
And small urn persist against the weeds and ivy
Under the ancient yew. You call and tidy up
Each time that you pass through.
…
The diction, typically, is plain enough—almost Larkinesque—but tensioned a little by the alliterative elements; the detail is economical and evocative. An image like the ‘barbed brambles’ doesn’t draw attention to itself, nor the slight, ironic stretching of the line from Binyon. But this is personal: the marble chips, and the small urn are details that really focus the scene. The ‘you’ is one you believe in. And that lovely South Wales word ‘crachach’. (The Oxford Welsh Dictionary gives it as ‘snobs’, which doesn’t quite do justice to the attitude it conveys to the social hierarchy.) So the poem builds a picture, again typically, towards its final wry observation in which the ‘angled grips and coloured foot-holds’ pattern the walls like stained glass or fragments of an exploding star.
Regional history, too, is a rich seam. “Climbing the Overhang” is followed by a proper yarn, a story told and retold with variations, about a simple lad from Llansteffan who was seven years running the “mayor” of their summer carnival, and who tried, at first unsuccessfully, to enlist in 1914.
Bonny who was no idiot savant. Bonny
who was shipped home shaking and twitching,
who’d carried shrapnel and gas in his head for years,
which is what we boys laughed at out of fear, and knowing no better.
There’s a meditation on the railway scrapyard near Barry, again with an emphasis on family connections and an ending that makes you think twice about ‘the romance of steam’. And there are two powerful documentary poems, dealing with a nineteenth-century murder, for which the perpetrator was hanged, twice, in Carmarthen (This in carefully constructed pastiche of Victorian formal language). Also “The Trials of Anne James” whose new-born was recovered from a pit shaft, near Haverfordwest, I think, shortly after its birth. Her story is told in the voices of her contemporaries—a local lass, the doctor, the coroner—and finally in the words of the poet himself:
Anne James, working the winch,
Nine months gone and unmarried:
the sun cooking, her womb an oven.
The handle brushing her belly
At every turn.
At every turn
Her arms and back complain.
Each bucket of coal a blackness that blinks
As it’s born into the light of its first day.
So much packed into those eight lines: the mores of the time, the desperation of labour (in both senses), the repetitive drudgery of the task. How right the linear separation of that repeated phrase ‘At every turn’! And the wonderful image of the sunlight striking the facets of the hewn coal, in all its ambiguous significance.
With the last coal-fired power-station in the UK closing down, it’s not a bad time to reflect on the societal importance of coal in the Valleys, and the long shadows cast by the headstocks and the tips. No-one born before the sixties can forget the tragedy that devastated Aberfan in 1966. Right at the heart of this book is a sequence of seven poems prompted by the record of American photojournalist I.C. ‘Chuck’ Rapoport who travelled to the village and stayed there for two months at the end of that year. In an article written in 2005 he recalled:
‘I didn't know any of the villagers but I was about meet most of them, and to document
their shock and grief and the stirrings of life after so much loss. I left Aberfan on Christmas
Day 1966, never to forget the events I witnessed, the faces of the decent people I studied,
their stories, and their sorrows.’
The photographs were exhibited in the National Library of Wales in that year, and again in 2016 and at the Redhouse in Merthyr Tydfil to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the disaster. Tony Curtis’s responses are as telling as those black and white images. The two media work movingly together. The sequence is called Aberfan Voices and it speaks out of the pictures, of lives unfolding after the events of that dreadful day. It’s almost impossible to quote from any one of the poems outside its context, but to give an indication, at least, here is the boy of about seven photographed between two great boulder-sized sacks holding his toy aeroplane:
And we will fly over Wales
And I will look out the window and point and say,
“Down by there is where we lived,
That little village in a valley.
No
Not that valley, the other one
With the green slopes and the new houses and see –
That new building, the school.”
It would be wrong to give the impression that Leaving the Hills is in any way parochial. The collection travels far and wide—in time and space. The title poem is a monologue in the voice of Aldous Huxley, There are boxing poems, poems for the painter Hanlyn Davies in New England, a ‘Jazz Suite’… To an extent, the reader’s response to these may be coloured by his or her enthusiasm for the subject matter. If you’re into Charlie Parker, Stan Getz and Scott LaFaro you’ll enjoy their elegies, the vivid evocation of the clubs and coteries of their eras and the song references. The biographical details that trickle away from the lovely opening line of the Billie Holliday (‘Her voice was honey and sour lemons’) are interesting but they don’t reveal much you wouldn’t get from reading Lady Sings the Blues, though Curtis’s skill is often to transcend the particular and hint at the universal, which is what a good ekphrastic poem has to do—as in the Hanlyn Davies “Hand Mirror”:
Its beveled border and tooled silver back
Turned every day into a kaleidoscope of angles.
When she held it the room splintered
Then became the centre of everything.
Among the literary pieces there are tributes to Dannie Abse and Helen Dunmore and a doffing of the cap to Michael Longley, ‘the cold, peaty water’ of his words. You wouldn’t at first detect an influence of Longley on Tony Curtis, except perhaps in their storytelling, but it’s there in the simplicity of “Belgian Hares”, and the knowing misdirection of its closing line. Here’s that poem in its entirety:
On the drive from Pilkem to Artillery Wood
In the wide field’s stubble we see a hare
Rise up from its haunches,
Stand tall, then with sinewy legs
Stretching and pumping, bound
Directly into a solid wall of ripe corn
To disappear.
There is no metaphor here.
It’s forty years, too, since Tony Curtis won the National Poetry Competition with “The Death of Richard Beattie-Seaman in Belgian Grand Prix, 1939”, an imagined glimpse into the dramatic end of a man who had lived life at extremes. He’s still writing poems that explore the painful, passionate, paradoxical experience of what he called then ‘a great race’.
Oct 10 2024
London Grip Poetry Review – Tony Curtis
Poetry review – LEAVING THE HILLS: Stuart Henson reviews Tony Curtis’s latest collection and reflects on many years of thoughtful, well-observed poetry
It’s forty years since I last reviewed a book by Tony Curtis—a slim volume from Poetry Wales Press entitled Letting Go. My copy still retains a slip with a note in Howard Sergeant’s precise hand apologising for the lack of space available—two books in 400 words. I can’t remember who the other poet was. A lot of water has flowed under the Towy Bridge since then. (The home computer was in its infancy. The first, brick-sized, mobile phones were still two years away.) And in that gap of time Poetry Wales Press has morphed into Seren, reviews are seldom commissioned by post, the Creative Writing industry has burgeoned… Don’t get me going! I dread to think what youthful misjudgements I may have visited on those two unsuspecting volumes. We change. We grow wiser—we hope. And over the four decades what’s au courant in poetry has changed too. Tony Curtis’s work in many ways provides the perfect glass through which to examine what we valued—what we still value—in poetry, and why it remains important.
In an age when the poet’s persona is often foregrounded, it’s easy to forget that despite the influence of Plath, Moore and Lowell and the colossal magnetism of the then poet laureate, the mainstream in the last decades of the last century was dominated by attentive observation: the poet as disinterested recorder, interpreter, storyteller, raconteur… Of course, that’s to over-simplify, and you can no doubt cite any number of exceptions, but certainly in Letting Go there were poems of family life, poems about photographs, poems about Wyeth and Chagall, a dead rabbit, a Vietnam veteran, the shooting of John Lennon… all recorded with intelligence and precision and a belief in the power of truth-in-language. And what we find in Leaving the Hills is not so radically different. Times have moved on but Tony Curtis’s ‘core values’ remain constant. “Flying the Lanner”, for instance, is as lovingly and closely observed as any scene from Ken Loach’s Kes, and although his “Bosherston Pike”, ‘Cruising the pools like a U-boat in the shadows’, may not have the sonorousness of Hughes’s, it’d put up as good a fight for a place in any fisherman’s anthology.
The collection’s prime virtue, as you might expect, is its ability to give a local habitation and a name to the timeless, universal things that add up to human life. “Climbing the Overhang” is a good exemplar. It’s a poem about the ‘repurposed’ Eglwys Dewi Sant in Carmarthen, sold off to become a ‘climbing and bouldering centre’:
The diction, typically, is plain enough—almost Larkinesque—but tensioned a little by the alliterative elements; the detail is economical and evocative. An image like the ‘barbed brambles’ doesn’t draw attention to itself, nor the slight, ironic stretching of the line from Binyon. But this is personal: the marble chips, and the small urn are details that really focus the scene. The ‘you’ is one you believe in. And that lovely South Wales word ‘crachach’. (The Oxford Welsh Dictionary gives it as ‘snobs’, which doesn’t quite do justice to the attitude it conveys to the social hierarchy.) So the poem builds a picture, again typically, towards its final wry observation in which the ‘angled grips and coloured foot-holds’ pattern the walls like stained glass or fragments of an exploding star.
Regional history, too, is a rich seam. “Climbing the Overhang” is followed by a proper yarn, a story told and retold with variations, about a simple lad from Llansteffan who was seven years running the “mayor” of their summer carnival, and who tried, at first unsuccessfully, to enlist in 1914.
There’s a meditation on the railway scrapyard near Barry, again with an emphasis on family connections and an ending that makes you think twice about ‘the romance of steam’. And there are two powerful documentary poems, dealing with a nineteenth-century murder, for which the perpetrator was hanged, twice, in Carmarthen (This in carefully constructed pastiche of Victorian formal language). Also “The Trials of Anne James” whose new-born was recovered from a pit shaft, near Haverfordwest, I think, shortly after its birth. Her story is told in the voices of her contemporaries—a local lass, the doctor, the coroner—and finally in the words of the poet himself:
Anne James, working the winch, Nine months gone and unmarried: the sun cooking, her womb an oven. The handle brushing her belly At every turn. At every turn Her arms and back complain. Each bucket of coal a blackness that blinks As it’s born into the light of its first day.So much packed into those eight lines: the mores of the time, the desperation of labour (in both senses), the repetitive drudgery of the task. How right the linear separation of that repeated phrase ‘At every turn’! And the wonderful image of the sunlight striking the facets of the hewn coal, in all its ambiguous significance.
With the last coal-fired power-station in the UK closing down, it’s not a bad time to reflect on the societal importance of coal in the Valleys, and the long shadows cast by the headstocks and the tips. No-one born before the sixties can forget the tragedy that devastated Aberfan in 1966. Right at the heart of this book is a sequence of seven poems prompted by the record of American photojournalist I.C. ‘Chuck’ Rapoport who travelled to the village and stayed there for two months at the end of that year. In an article written in 2005 he recalled:
The photographs were exhibited in the National Library of Wales in that year, and again in 2016 and at the Redhouse in Merthyr Tydfil to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the disaster. Tony Curtis’s responses are as telling as those black and white images. The two media work movingly together. The sequence is called Aberfan Voices and it speaks out of the pictures, of lives unfolding after the events of that dreadful day. It’s almost impossible to quote from any one of the poems outside its context, but to give an indication, at least, here is the boy of about seven photographed between two great boulder-sized sacks holding his toy aeroplane:
And we will fly over Wales And I will look out the window and point and say, “Down by there is where we lived, That little village in a valley. No Not that valley, the other one With the green slopes and the new houses and see – That new building, the school.”It would be wrong to give the impression that Leaving the Hills is in any way parochial. The collection travels far and wide—in time and space. The title poem is a monologue in the voice of Aldous Huxley, There are boxing poems, poems for the painter Hanlyn Davies in New England, a ‘Jazz Suite’… To an extent, the reader’s response to these may be coloured by his or her enthusiasm for the subject matter. If you’re into Charlie Parker, Stan Getz and Scott LaFaro you’ll enjoy their elegies, the vivid evocation of the clubs and coteries of their eras and the song references. The biographical details that trickle away from the lovely opening line of the Billie Holliday (‘Her voice was honey and sour lemons’) are interesting but they don’t reveal much you wouldn’t get from reading Lady Sings the Blues, though Curtis’s skill is often to transcend the particular and hint at the universal, which is what a good ekphrastic poem has to do—as in the Hanlyn Davies “Hand Mirror”:
Among the literary pieces there are tributes to Dannie Abse and Helen Dunmore and a doffing of the cap to Michael Longley, ‘the cold, peaty water’ of his words. You wouldn’t at first detect an influence of Longley on Tony Curtis, except perhaps in their storytelling, but it’s there in the simplicity of “Belgian Hares”, and the knowing misdirection of its closing line. Here’s that poem in its entirety:
It’s forty years, too, since Tony Curtis won the National Poetry Competition with “The Death of Richard Beattie-Seaman in Belgian Grand Prix, 1939”, an imagined glimpse into the dramatic end of a man who had lived life at extremes. He’s still writing poems that explore the painful, passionate, paradoxical experience of what he called then ‘a great race’.