![]() Though paralysed below the waist, he remained positive, continued to watch the yellowhammers outside his window and never allowed his many visitors to feel downhearted. We were both determined that it shouldn't be just a platform for the editor's friends but should be open to good poets of all stripes.īut early in 2013 all plans had to be shelved as this active outdoor man was diagnosed with incurable cancer. He was active in the Hardy Society, editing the Thomas Hardy Journal for several years, worked quietly for the Campaign to Protect Rural England, and spent a lot of time caring for his mother, who lived to a great age.Įventually, he moved to Plymouth and in 2010 took over from me as the editor of the little magazine The Interpreter's House, which he made, in Hardy's phrase, "a house of hospitalities". Armed with an English degree from Cambridge University, and a PhD from Essex, on Darwin as writer and scientist, he became a lecturer in comparative literature at Manchester University. In the same year he brought out in a limited edition a sequence of poems, Views, beautifully produced and with sympathetic wood engravings by Ian Stephens.Simon was born in Burnley, Lancashire, the son of Susan, an English teacher, and the Rev Douglas Curtis, a vicar, and grew up in Northamptonshire. ![]() From this experience came The Chronometer: some Australian and other poems, published by the Australian Paper Bark press in 1990. The title testifies to his abiding love of football and cricket (he was an ardent, if usually woebegone supporter of Northamptonshire CCC), and various poems in this and subsequent collections explore his passion for music (from jazz to "dull old Haydn and Mozart"), as well as his appreciation of English woodcut and landscape artists, among them Bewick, Cotman, and the lesser known William Payne and John Glover.Ĭurtis discovered the work of Glover, who had emigrated to Tasmania in 1831, when he spent 1989 as a visiting lecturer at the University of New South Wales. His next collection, Sports Extra, was published by Littlewood Press in 1988. The collection attracted enough favourable notices for Curtis to be included in a Faber Introduction. In the 1950s Davie had been a key poet in the Movement, whose formalism was greatly to Curtis's taste, though by the early 1960s he was an enthusiastic champion of Ezra Pound, to whose work Curtis was at best politely indifferent. After studying under the Yeats scholar, TR Henn, at St Catherine's College, Cambridge, he began a PhD thesis on 19th century American travel writing at the new University of Essex, under the supervision of Donald Davie. Soon after his birth, his father, an Anglican priest, became vicar at Towcester, Northants, where Curtis grew up in semi-rural circumstances. ![]() He knew that in many ways he had landed softly. Although there was much about modern life not to his liking – he sometimes gave the impression of having wandered into the 20th century by mistake – he avoided hectic denunciations of the world in which he found himself. As probably befitted a lifelong supporter of Burnley FC, in the town were he was born, Simon Curtis had about him an habitual air of rueful good cheer.
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