Poetry review: Leaving the Hills by Tony Curtis

Eric Ngalle Charles

Reading the poems in this collection is like a slow descent into the unknown. Tony Curtis has an uncanny way with syntax. The collection opens with the title poem, “Leaving the Hills,” which is a captivating piece on place and memory. I did a double take on the title as it reminded me of Horatio Clare’s Running for the Hills. As you sink into the poem, the poet pauses and asks, “So what is lost?’’ This question sets the mind pondering what we take and leave behind. Et voila, we enter a world of discovery. Each item listed in this poem is a forage into memory:

“The last Havanas Groucho gave me
In the box he drew on.’’

I found myself thinking about 1963 and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then there are the photos,

“Greta in baggy trousers, the face
Of a goddess hidden under the brimOf a large, floppy hat.’’

And then I want to know more about Greta and what invited men to her shores. And about
“The manuscripts that would have been my last works,
All overtaken by flames.’’

Reading this poem felt like I was getting lost in the world created by Rachel Meller in her novel, the sweeping family memoir The Box with the Sunflower Clasp. In Leaving the Hills, Tony Curtis dangles baits, encouraging us to bite and delve further. Where are we? Who is the goddess under the hat? And the flames that consumed the manuscripts, was it a natural disaster? Or was it man-made? What secrets are hidden in the treasure trove of the diaries? This poem is a gem for writers of long-form, creative non-fiction and fiction—each stanza opening out into a chapter.

In an article on his poetic craft Tony Curtis explained that “The poems in this collection are what I choose to keep and share from the last eight years since From the Fortunate Isles: Poems New and Selected came out.”
The resulting selection is sometimes intensely, deeply autobiographical. In the poem, “Longley’s Work” the poet says:

“Your books I keep
on the shelf besides my pillow;
slim and strong stalks full
of sap and bearing flowers.’’

This is a walk down memory lane, presenting flowers that, with proper nurturing, will bear fruits for us all. Writers plant trees so mere mortals like us can one day sit under their canopy. In Leaving the Hills, Tony Curtis freely plants many saplings, both familiar and unfamiliar, yet I wash my face “With the cold peaty water of your words.’’ I read this line and yelled; in which language do I cry? The autobiographical nature of some of these poems makes them not just a literary journey but a deeply personal one for the reader.
I thought I was foraying into the realm of nature writing with the poem “Of Barnacles, Geese, and Other Wonders’’ which takes its cue from Gerald of Wales’ account of his visit to Ireland in the 12th century. This poem frightened me. The errors of our ways are kept secret until the eighth stanza. However, I will leave you to make this discovery yourself. But stanza six reads:

“No eggs are laid by these birds after copulation,
as is the case with birds in general;
the hen never sits on eggs to hatch them;
in no corner of the world are they seen to pair and build nests.’’

In this poem, you will learn about Barnacles and be transported back to the good old days when Adam and Eve roamed the vastness of Eden naked, and here the master orator asks us, or maybe orders us to

“Repent, all you unhappy infidels,
recollect, though it be late,
our shared Eden.’’

It calls on us to respect nature and to leave the world better for the generations after us. Indeed, as the poet opines: “We praise our Maker by walking the world.’’

The poems in “Aberfan Voices” are like the sound of rain on the windowpane, tok tok, tok, pinging at our memories:

“And the sun will shine on the river Taff,
Clean and silver,
With the children playing and fishing.’’

Such poignancy. Reading it, I saw children, boys, and girls, getting dressed in the morning, saying goodbye to mum, dad and others, their faces beaming with a thousand smiles, dreaming of a future packed with stars, moons, and the trickling of a small river. Some had ponytails, and others had Bantu knots. If only they knew what disaster awaited them.

Poets beget poets. Curtis himself cites influences including Michael Longley, Dannie Abse, Helen Dunmore, and Glyn Jones: visual artists, too, such as Jack Crabtree, Charles Burton, Alan Salisbury, David Nash, Rozanne Hawksley and Hanlyn Davies.
Poems beget poems in the same way. The poem, “Delivery” opens like Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est.” In the case of “Aberfan Voices,” a sequence written for the 50th anniversary of the disaster the cues are visual not verbal. They are Curtis’ response to the photographs of Chuck Rapport, the American photojournalist who left his home in New York to capture the aftermath of the tragic events of 21st October 1966. On this dark day in Welsh history 144 people, including 116 children died when a coal waste tip slid down a mountain to engulf a school and nearby houses.

The last stanza of the poem “Where Was I?” reads:

“And where were when you heard about Aberfan?
Mid-shift, working at the face, blinded with dust that the tears
Began to wash, and the mandrel dropped
As my fist clenched, and I heard the distant howls of men.’’

The poems in this section are eery, chilling, and spine-numbing. Through them, the dead do speak. Tony Curtis has brought the victims back to life, hymning an ode to them and to the survivors.

This collection seems to have everything when you look – it encompasses history, travel, memory, and, of course, language, presented as a mixture of lyrical poems and longer dramatic monologues. We meet creatives and sportspeople such as writer Aldous Huxley, runner Roger Bannister and boxer Muhammed Ali, singer Billie Holiday and the composer Claude Debussy. We hear jazz, watch ballet, play rugby and eat freshly prepared rabbit. The range is wide, capaciously so. From “Madame des Lapins,’’ “Nature to Nature,’’ “Events at Carmarthen: 18th September 1829,’’ through to “Visitors’’ and “October Moon,’’ the eighty-three genre-crossing poems here assembled offer ample evidence of Tony Curtis being a master of many genres.

Tony Curtis‘ Leaving the Hills is published by Seren and is available from all good bookshops