Tony Curtis writes in concentric circles, from family into landscape into memory.

To do so, the poems move through childhood, old photographs, rural roads, bridges, weather, war and inherited anecdote, until they finally settle where he is satisfied, within folklore. Curtis’s “folk” are made up of bodies, voices and places: parents, neighbours, vanished figures, remembered gestures, the dead continuing to occupy the physical world.

The collection has an unshowy documentary quality, but it is alert to the distortions of memory. Poems such as “When I Lay my Hand” fold landscape into grief and inheritance, while elsewhere ordinary objects and local histories become small repositories of collective memory. 

Arc Publications, Todmorden, 2011. First edition. Paperback. Light shelf wear; internally clean. Inscribed and signed by Tony Curtis on the title page, dated 1 March 2011.