Our Bookshelf
Browse our Bookshelves, selected annually by the Exchange as a window to recent Welsh literary works which we recommend for translation.
“This wide-ranging collection sees Curtis writing at the height of his powers and confirms his position as one of Wales’s leading poets.”
Neil Leadbeater, Write Out Loud
“His words break through walls and cross boundaries not in an effort to reach a final destination, but in an attempt to learn the necessary arts of modern survival.”
Professor M. Wynn Thomas
“The poems reverberate with present, sensuous experiences, but beyond their immediacy there is a deep hinterland of public and private histories, grief and delight.”
Helen Dunmore
Leaving The Hills
Leaving the Hills is a collection full of stories from everywhere by a great Welsh poet at the height of his powers.
In his first poetry collection since From the Fortunate Isles: New & Selected Poems (Seren, 2016) Tony Curtis brings together poems that range from California to Carmarthen, Medieval Ireland to present-day Wales; there are lyrical poems and longer dramatic monologues. His subjects range from Roger Bannister to Muhammed Ali, from Billie Holiday to Claude Debussy. There is a moving sequence written for the 50th anniversary of the Aberfan disaster, in response to the photographs of Chuck Rapport.
Here is a standout collection which explores and defines the times we live in. As we read, we see that the title becomes a metaphor for that moment when we are forced to choose what to take and what to leave behind. Curtis chooses moments of brilliance, of epiphany, of knowledge and of vividness. In Leaving the Hills, there is everything he would wish to save from the fire.
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(2024)
Seren (2024) | 978-1781727423
90pp
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(2024)
Seren holds English language rights and right to license foreign language and overseas editions.
Reviews
“This wide-ranging collection sees Curtis writing at the height of his powers and confirms his position as one of Wales’s leading poets.”
Read more reviewsNeil Leadbeater, Write Out Loud