In Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, with Tony Curtis and Cynan Jones from 2016.
From left: Tony Curtis, Amy Wack (Seren Poetry Editor), Cynan Jones
Tony Curtis has been writing poetry for fifty years, and his 2016 collection, From the Fortunate Isles: New and Selected Poems contains poems from ten of his published collections, as well as fifty pages of new poems. This is a poet whose themes and variations remain consistent: a deep affection for his roots in West Wales, tender attachments to family, a profound interest in the wars of the last century, and an abiding fascination for all art forms, particularly painting and poetry.
Here we are featuring one of the new poems Tony read on the night – for all of you who missed his entertaining performance.
Seamus on the Tube
Looking away, not looking away –
The happenstance of what may change everything;
Those standing commuters moving off at Charing Cross
For the Bakerloo Line and then your eyes lifting
Above those seated opposite, as one does, to read
Between faster Broadband and Las Vegas –
“Where your accent is an aphrodisiac,” it says,
And where “what happens here, stays here,”
The Railway Children where in the white cups
Of the telegraph wires a young boy knows
That words are carried in the shiny pouches of raindrops.
Like this poem carried for you in the red and white Tube
On the Northern Line in cold January’s real freeze;
Snow is promised in the suburbs so everyone’s scarved
Against the weather. Words taking you back to the fifties
And his boyhood summers before everything changed.
Reaching Warren Street, you’ve read it
Four or five times, absorbed the innocent wisdom
And sense of the thing. Those people opposite
See a crazy old man mouthing words, appearing to sing.
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A JAZZ SUITE
The Last of Scott LaFaro
What survived your death on the road from Geneva
Was the Prescott double bass from 1825
Made by that master luthier in Concord, New Hampshire.
Ebony and maple inlay, strengthened neck of slab-cut fir,
Pulled scorched from the wreck you died in, going
Off the highway into trees that night towards Flint
On Route 20 that stretches from East coast to West.
The charred remains identified by your St Christopher;
Your last gig – Newport Jazz with Stan Getz blowing.
But what lives is the trio’s final set at the Vanguard
In the Village two weeks before: inspired Bill Evans,
His hands, your hands in dialogue, with Paul Motian
Teasing and brushing the hi-hat and skins,
You underpinning the melody, counter to the tune.
Oh to have been that downtown girl at the corner table
Swirling her Manhattan over ice, caught up in your playing,
Feeling your bass rhythms enter her soul,
Cold shouldering the clutz who was paying,
And sensing the promise of better things. 1961, June,
With Kennedy still reaching for the New Frontier,
Rushing towards our cool future’s glow:
Milestones. Detour Ahead, My Man’s Gone Now.
Billie Holiday: the colored canary
Good Morning Heartache, Don’t Explain.
Her voice was honey and sour lemons,
smoke-filled clubs and barbed wire.
That first gardenia pinned in her hair
drew blood as it pierced her head
and all the beauty in her life
was cut through with pain.
The men had come and the men had gone
for love is a faucet that turns off and on.
Lover Man, You Let Me Down, Mean to Me.
Charlie Parker: Chasin’ the Bird
Bird riding the subway ‘round midnight, into the early hours,
Times Square…23rd…Christopher Street…34th and Penn,
Washington Square…Columbus, on bourbon and heroin,
Switching cars and lines without purpose or sense,
The subway rails playing be-bop as he went.
And washing up in a club where Dizzy
Was at the bar checking out a new band.
‘Help me, Dizzy, why don’t you save me?
These kids can play, but now people just come to me
To see the world’s most famous junkie.’
Then a cab to the Rothschild Baroness at the Stanhope Hotel.
She called for a doctor, but Bird refused to go,
Just kept watching tv, the Dorsey Brothers Show,
That big band cruising and a guy who could juggle.
On her silk chaise longue Charlie’s heart gave up the struggle.
Still grieving his baby daughter, gone the year before,
His life had fallen apart.
The hole in her heart was a horn he wanted to blow life into,
Until his own heart played out. The autopsy report
Described a man of sixty. Charlie “Bird” Parker was thirty four.
Scattering Stan Getz
East of the sun and west of the moon
Go your ashes into the endless Pacific
Off the coast of Malibu in blazing, blue June.
Friends and family on a yacht
That rides the swell of the ocean’s swaying
Bass line. With your record playing –
Billy Strayhorn’s Blood Count
Blocking out the gulls and the waves:
Over the melancholy matter of goodbyes, life blown defiant.
‘I’ve got a big sound. It’s deceptively mellow but it carries.’
It’s night music, the sad music of the going man.
Then ashes poured from your saxophone case by your grandson.
Brubeck at St David’s Hall
An old man walks slowly across the stage,
So stiff and tired that it seems
He will not make it to the Steinway.
The hall is so quiet: it takes an age.
He sits and as he touches the keys
The audience rises to its feet, comes alive:
Five-four, five-four, five-four, five-four, five-four
– Take Five.
Caroline Gerbola on Conchita
For Peter Lavery
Pod comes running to our gang and says –
‘Seamus is catching something amazing
in the yard at the back of O’Leary’s!’
And when we got over there we started spying
around the wall to see –
this horse that was white, but not entirely,
with spots and strokes on it as if
a painter had flicked his brush with black and dark greys
over the paper.
A girl on top of him took off her Red Indian bonnet
and got the horse to bow down to a mat
she’d laid on O’Leary’s gravel.
There was no saddle that I could see, but a blanket and furs.
She had cowboy boots and leggings
and held in one hand a silver-topped cane or riding whip.
Her top was nothing to it and sparkly.
‘That would be the circus,’ said Pod,
but we’d all got that a mile before Pod who is not the fastest.
‘I’m asking my Ma for a ticket,’ he says.
But what would we be doing that for
with our money?
We’d seen the best of it –
the beautiful girl, the horse as big as a house
kneeling down for her and for us
because of what her legs had said to it
and her being one and the same with that magnificent beast.
Flaming June
The RA’s featured painting is Flaming June –
In a large, heavy gold-leafed frame
This young woman’s astounding beauty is displayed.
As she reclines, her red hair falls
And spreads to the ground.
It is impossibly long, as if curtains were drawn to reveal her.
She is dressed in a diaphanous peach gown which clings
And locks our gaze – nipples, her right haunch angled to us,
Right leg over the left so that ankle and feet
Are precisely drawn under the silk.
You could stroke those toes.
Her eyes are blissfully closed;
She is far away in memory or dreams,
Resting against a parapet, on which grows
Oleander – that beautiful and toxic bloom.
Beyond is a line of silver sea and a vague other land.
Lord Frederick Leighton has given us this vision of desire,
A Victorian fin-de-siècle piece of erotica.
I sit on the bench in the middle of the room.
And when I next look up a woman in a black abaya
Stands in front, interrupting my gaze.
She holds up her iPhone to capture the painting,
As we all do in galleries these days.
Covered from head to ankle, her form is invisible.
I guess her eyes are dark. Who knows?
On her feet are pink Nike Pegasus.
What colour is her hair?
What body is shaped under those loose, hanging clothes?
Her phone has Leighton’s beauty in focus.
What is it that she is taking away?
Who will she share this with, and what will they say?
The Painter Iwan Gwyn Parry
(1970-2025)
At the end, they had you on a drip.
Lover of fancy meals, gourmet talker-up of good food.
Which you secretly threw up.
Rachub – translates as a “safe place” –
But your village sounds like it’s racked and ribbed in extremis
With you starving there in the unforgiving weather and hard slate.
A long-gone marriage and two distant daughters.
Friends and colleagues and rapt, loyal students
Were not enough, and we are all bereft,
Lost in our helplessness to save you from yourself.
Always our dandy in the north –
Barbour International, Donegal tweeds,
Fine tan leather boots, polished, too good for trekking.
That silk-necktie noosed around your gaunt throat.
Our friend, your mentor, Peter, claimed he could,
On a rare cloud-free, clear day see the Wicklow Mountains
From his Deiniolen studio. His passing hit you hard.
Your views and angles were always liminal –
The cliffs facing west on Ynys Môn jagged above the waves,
Edging the Irish Sea, its depths of green and yellow and blues,
The Ferry a stroke of white, small and resolute,
Somewhere in the middle of its journey.
Or low wetlands arcing to the west, never a soul in sight,
The flats of mud and grass with spiked stakes marking out the way.
An overview of a refinery, a factory, as if you were flying over,
Not taking the boat from Holyhead.
It was all on the edge of Wales and the known world.
You were always going beyond, chasing
The infinite perspective lines of your shrinking self.
The last exhibition was large and light and full of energy.
And your paintings, the new ones, were visionary
Bright, vibrant imagined skies. A painter’s heaven.
That opening night, Cardiff was awash under Storm Amy,
The roads were rivers, the lights smeared,
So, there was never going to be a big crowd.
But you worked the gallery room, polite, laughing,
Your cheek bones sharp and frail; you were
Belsen-boned when Margaret hugged you.
I sent you an email, congratulating you on the work.
Seven years dry, feeling stronger, you claimed to see –
The way ahead to greater things, I can begin
To relax with this searching, and enjoy the exploration,
This archaeological study into myself and image-making.
I can return to my easel again.
I’ve missed its tranquillity.
Up-beat, with new promise and purpose,
You were keeping up the show.
But your pained soul, your spent body
Just said, “No.”
