Heaven’s Gate

Tony Curtis’s new collection of poems encompasses a wide variety of forms and subjects in which he looks at the world with an ever keener eye. Heaven’s gate is the eagerly awaited new collection by one of Britains’s best poets. Though Curtis’s themes and subject matter are diverse, there is a persuasive clarity to his poems. His style is seemingly casual, almost artless, but is actually carefully composed. The sonnet sequence dedicated to a son studying abroad, ‘Letters to Gareth in Amherst’, is characteristic. The light newsy voice contrasts with the tight sonnet form while the rhymes become the envelope containing and restraining the father’s emotions. Conversely, casual domestic encounters and incidents take on a beguiling intimacy. In the title poem the hale Bopp comet is glimpsed and consiered from the carpark of an Indian restaurant. As ever, these well-crafted poems are grounded in the particular but insinuated by the universal.