After eleven collections and many anthologies, I no longer worry about poems drying up: they come when they come. Occasionally, I take an active part in pursuing them, but if there’s a week or two, or even a month or two since the last poem, well, the writing in other forms continues – a review, an obit (more of these at my age), a PowerPoint talk for U3As and History groups, and the re-working of my second novel, which is still ‘in progress’.

In my second (unpublished) novel The History Race, just as with my first novel, Darkness in the City of Light poems sit alongside dialogues, documentary passages (real or imagined) photographs and press cuttings (actual or imagined).

In Darkness in the City of Light, there’s a poem in the narrative called ‘Taking Line 5, January 1945’, where one of the disappeared men comes back to Paris. The Germans took a million and a half Frenchmen away – I didn’t know that – and the survivors dribbled back and they were broken. At first, people didn’t want to look at them, they didn’t want to look at their own defeat. In the Metro carriage, it takes a while for a woman to get up to give him her seat – but then everyone finally acknowledges he’s there.

 

And though he wore no yellow star

and there was no visible tattoo,

he wore his suffering clearly,

the blackened teeth, the sallow skin,

ill-fitting clothes and that distant stare,

the empty eyes of a Muselmann

whose vision had been worn out with horrors.

The old lady wearing entre deux guerres

Chanel tweed, jewels and a fox-fur,

rose out of her seat and offered it to him:

‘Monsieur, ici.’ The carriage went quiet,

we all looked down at our feet,

not wishing to witness one of the walking dead.

And nothing was said. Nothing was said.

That last line and its repetition gives me a tremor when I read it, and usually I do include it in readings. Following the practice of my friend and mentor, Dannie Abse, I see no reason not to use a powerful piece of writing in more than one context. Yes, it appears again in a memory of one of my central characters in The History Race.

That eleventh collection, Leaving the Hills open with a poem that tells of Aldous Huxley’s escape from a Californian wildfire. In 1961.

 

And as we were halted at a red light

Before the Hollywood Boulevard en route

Rooms hurriedly booked at the Chateau Marmont

I started to float, my body’s weight left there

On the cool leather of the limousine.

 

I felt

Extraordinarily clean, extraordinarily clear.

Given more time,

That could have been a fresh start.

 

Given the time, I might be able to see this collection as a jumping off point, as well as a reflection of my sixth decade of writing and publishing poetry. It certainly has the range and scope that both readers and myself would expect. Key to my continuing as a poet is the constant admiration for and inspiration from other poets; they are manifest in my reading – Michael Longley, Dannie Abse, Helen Dunmore, Glyn Jones – and artists – Jack Crabtree, Charles Burton, Alan Salisbury, David Nash, Rozanne Hawksley and, of course Hanlyn Davies, whose painting is used on the cover.

The collection has a number of photographs – seven of Chuck Rapoport’s 1965 Aberfan photos, one of Debussy, a couple of the boxer Jimmy Wilde, whose poems were included in The Lonely Crowd, Issue 14, and one of the circus works of Peter Lavery, ‘Caroline Gerbola on Conchita’:

 

We’d seen the best of it –

the beautiful girl, the horse as big as a house

kneeling down for her and for us

because of what her legs had said to it

and her being one and the same with that magnificent beast.

 

My first reading from the new collection was last year at the Strokestown Festival in Ireland; I asked the other reader Ger Reidy to read that one, as an innocent young lad. The voice is not mine, nor would I attempt an accent in front of an Irish audience. That said, many of my poems for many years have been dramatic monologues: a cleansing of the confessional self.

 

Leaving the Hills spans the range of my interests: there is a sequence of five jazz poems:

 

‘I’ve got a big sound. It’s deceptively mellow but it carries,’

It’s night music, the sad music of the going man.

Then ashes poured from your saxophone case by your grandson.

 

(‘Scattering Stan Getz’)

 

As well as one which links the great ballet dancer Sir Frederick Ashton with slavery. There are poems about sport – Jimmy Wilde, ‘The Tylorstown Terror’, Ali’s fights with Sonny Liston, and the four minute mile man Roger Bannister. The Jimmy Wilde poems came as a direct result of the Covid lockdown. We were still living in Barry and the large local town cemetery was one of places that we could legally visit for our walks. I had some difficulty in locating the grave and then determined to research the man and explore his story. His boxing nicknames suggested a way of doing that in three distinct phases. I felt that here was a human story, a particularly Welsh story, which could engage people, beyond the immediate and possibly shrinking audience for boxing.

Of course, what one intends in the work may not connect in the intended way with whatever audience for poetry still exists. That said, it is reassuring to read reviews of the work which are sufficiently informed and perceptive to engage meaningfully with the poems. Most recently, this appeared:

Nigel Jarrett in Acumen, May 2025 wrote:

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.

I agree, I am resolutely no longer a confessional poet, my range is wider and resolutely public: I reference historical and contemporary matters. But there are in the collection personal poems about my granddaughter, Kate, and my last days in my mother’s Pembrokeshire village of Lydstep as the pandemic closed life down:

 

This county’s a long way from anywhere,

and closed to visitors now: the police run checks.

Our Headland’s been an Iron Age promontory fort,

a narrow strip to defend with the sea at your back.

 

In the war, Mum’s friend Reg had held a rope

over the edge near Whitesheet Rock above the crashing sea

for school mates to raid the crevice nest for gulls’ eggs.

‘Big and rich, but tasting of fish. Still, we was so hungry.’

 

It is good to have resonances between poems in a collection, and in ‘Madame des Lapins’ friends who have a house in France source a fresh rabbit for the table:

 

We eat what we have to eat – Stalingrad, the Irish Famine.

At the end, in St. Malo when the Germans locked the gates and battened down

Against that terrible bombing, there was no cat, dog, or rat to be seen.

Just ‘Lapins du Boche’, the bones picked clean.

 

War and hunger: when the water and food runs out, when our Green concerns fail, in the end, what will we decide to keep? Some poems, I hope.

Since my collection Leaving the Hills was published a year ago, I have had an unusually steady run of new poems. That is probably the stark fact of my next and final decade approaching. The latest of these poems is ‘Ageing’:

 

Ageing

No baggage

under the eyes.

 

Perhaps in a certain morning light

the neck is loose and puckered.

A turkey, you might say.

 

But mostly in the truthful crook

of your arm when it’s turned

to smooth your hair,

or to loosen your collar.

 

The way the light makes skin ridged,

wooden: the bark of an old tree,

that elder which grew outside

the door of the Rectory,

or was it rooted in the wall itself?

 

The skin wrinkles into cables

like the knitting your mother

worked on, with the wireless playing

– Family Favourites, Mrs Dale’s Diary –

a scarf and mitts for the Winter.

 

So, there’s nothing new in poetry – ‘In my end is my beginning’ – ancient truths, as Vernon Watkins would have it. That rectory is my Uncle Ivor’s place in the now disappeared village of Pwllcrochan, on the haven of Milford, which I reference in another recent poem ‘Birding’, derived from a story told by Jon Gower. Writing down that place-name, ‘Pwllcrochan’, is always a way of preserving the hamlet and memories and the lives there. My cousins and their egg collection, Jack Watts and his potato wisdom, the noise and reek of the oil refineries. Poems evoke the half-forgotten and the precious; they are also what carries us forward. But readers of The Lonely Crowd already know that.#

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 From the Fortunate Isles: New and Selected Poems and Leaving the Hills. 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.