Ships in Bottles

‘Of every poem the authorship is twofold — the poet himself and the language he inherits from countless men and women, known and unknown, who have used and formed and loaded its words with meaning. Neil Curry’s poems are characterised by a precise and profound sense of the English language as the matrix of our culture. He uses words with both exactness and feeling. His themes perpetuate the minutiae of lives and places on the frontiers of anonymity, subtleties and details whose precision draws from the records of history resonances of a latent poetry. A poet who respects his inheritance, he also transmits unimpaired — indeed recharged — England’s greatest wealth, our language.’

Kathleen Raine