Leaving the Hills

Leaving the Hills by Tony Curtis is a collection full of stories from everywhere by a great Welsh poet at his best. From the Welsh mountains to the Hollywood Hills, these lyrical poems explore events from both history and modern life, questioning how far we’ve really progressed. Filled with dramatic monologues and personalities as various as Roger Bannister, Muhammed Ali, Billie Holiday and Claude Debussy, Leaving the Hills is a collection which explores and defines the times we live in. 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 these poems, there is everything he would wish to save from the fire.

Tony Curtis was born in Carmarthen in 1946 and grew up there and in Pembrokeshire, where his grandmother’s family had lived for hundreds of years. He read English at Swansea University, did an MFA in Goddard College, Vermont and spent forty years in education, from 1969 to 2009, as a school teacher then a college lecturer and as Wales’s first Professor of Poetry at the University of Glamorgan, where he developed and directed the M. Phil in Writing. He has written and edited over forty books, most recently his first novel Darkness in the City of Light and an anthology of poems for the Ty Hafan children’s charity - Where the Birds Sing our Names. He was awarded a Gregory Award in 1972; he won the National Poetry Competition in 1983. In 1993, he won the Dylan Thomas Award for Spoken Poetry, judged by Dannie Abse and Dylan’s daughter Aeronwy. He had a Cholmondeley Award in 1998. He was awarded a D.Litt. in 2004. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. A full bibliography and biography may be found at www.tonycurtispoet.com