R. N. Currey


Ralph Nixon Currey was a South African born poet, who wrote in English.

Life

He was born in Mafeking, South Africa, the son of John Currey and his wife Edith Vinnicombe. His father was an English Methodist minister who had come out with the British troops at the end of the Second Anglo-Boer War. He attended Kingswood School, Bath and Wadham College, Oxford. Currey married Stella Martin in 1932. He taught at Colchester Royal Grammar School from 1934 to 1973.
Currey 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 thought it was "the best war poetry in the correct sense of the term that I have seen in these past years".
Currey died at home in Colchester, England.

Works

Tiresias, Oxford University, 1940Heavy Guns, New English Weekly, 1942The Poetry Magazine July 1944This Other Planet, 1945Poems from India Indian Landscape, Routledge, 1947Formal Spring, OUP, 1950Poets of the 1939-1945 War, British Council, 1951 Letters of a Natal sheriff: Thomas Phipson, 1969