R. N. Currey

Ralph Nixon "R.N." Currey (14 December 1907 – 18 November 2001) was a South African born poet, who wrote in English. He was born in Mafeking, South Africa. His father was an English Methodist minister who had come out with the British troops at the end of the Boer War. He attended Kingswood School, Bath and Wadham College, Oxford.^[1] Currey married Stella Martin in 1932. He taught at the Royal Grammar, Colchester (1934–73).

He was called up in 1941 to the Royal Corps of Signals before transferring to the Royal Artillery where he received his commission. In 1945 T. S. Eliot wrote to him about his work This Other Planet, telling him that he though it was "the best war poetry in the correct sense of the term that I have seen in these past years".^[2]

He died at home in Colchester, England.^[3]

Works

• Tiresias, Oxford University, 1940
• Heavy Guns, New English Weekly, 1942
• The Poetry Magazine July 1944^[4]
• This Other Planet, 1945
• Poems from India (Bombay, 1945) (London, 1946)
• Indian Landscape, Routledge, 1947
• Formal Spring, OUP, 1950
• Poets of the 1949-1945 War, British Council, 1951 (Longmans, 1967)^[5]
• Letters of a Natal sheriff: Thomas Phipson, 1969
• The Africa We Knew, David Philip, 1973
• Vinnicombe's Trek, 1989^[6]
• Collected Poems, James Currey publishers, 2001^[7]

References