Click below to read an extract (Adobe Acrobat Reader required)
Synopsis
When Sometimes all I can Imagine are Hands There is a winter within me, a place so cold, so covered in snow, I rarely go there. But sometimes, when all I can imagine are hands, when trees in the forest look like they’re made of wood, then I know it’s time to take my photograph of Akhmatova and sling it in a bag with socks and scarves. My neighbours must think it strange to see me strapping on my snowshoes, to hear me roar at the huskies as I untangle the harness. But when all you can imagine are hands it’s best to give a little wave and move out into the whiteness. Bicycles, famines, ghosts, grannies, Tibetan Buddhists, Beckettian sighs and Lucian Freud’s nudes are all revealed with a rare and loving simplicity in this selection from Tony Curtis’s six published poetry collections, which concludes with a body of new work. Life-giving, life-affirming poetry, full of loss, love and longing. “Underpinning the lyrical narrative is a writing style as graceful as the author’s thought.” Poetry Ireland Review Tony Curtis was born in Dublin in 1955. He is the author of six warmly received collections of poetry. His most recent, What Darkness Covers, was published by Arc in 2003. In that year also, he was the recipient of the Varuna House Exchange Fellowship in Australia. Curtis has been awarded the Irish National Poetry Prize and is a member of Aosdána, the Irish academy of the arts.
Not to be confused with the Welsh poet of the same name, Tony Curtis is lucid, playful, measured and achingly human in his approach to life and to poetry. This collection speaks straight from the heart, it's a book full of thoughtful and unillusioned lyric grace. It won't please the sad souls who come to poetry to find what they already know, nor to those even sadder souls whose perceptions are so distorted by the backwash of post-modernist cleverality that they have forgotten what lyric poetry is all about. Those deadened by irony in the soul, which is to say those many half-educated readers whose refuge from death is constant chatter, will most likely miss the point of these beautiful poems. Beckett would have liked this book, so would Marvell, but it won't mean much to those for whom Beckett means only Margaret, and Marvell is the misspelling of a comics imprint.
Thomas Quinn
Have you read The Well in the Rain: New and Selected Poems by Tony Curtis? - Add your own review
