Aldous Huxley and his wife Laura flee the Hollywood Hills as an all-consuming wildfire destroys one of the most expensive areas of Los Angeles. It is 1961. What of their lives can they save? A Welsh artist settled in the USA remembers his home back in Swansea. His father has hung a Calennig token from the light in the front room. What does that mean? In his first poetry collection since From the Fortunate Isles: New & Selected Poems, 2016, Tony Curtis brings together poems that range from California to Carmarthen, Medieval Ireland to present-day Wales; there are lyrical poems and longer dramatic monologues. His subjects range from Roger Bannister to Muhammed Ali, from Billie Holiday to Claude Debussy. There is a moving sequence written for the 50th anniversary of the Aberfan disaster, in response to the photographs of Chuck Rapoport. In his seventh decade, Tony Curtis has published "a genre-defying" first novel - Darkness in the City of Light, which was short-listed for the Society of Authors Paul Torday Prize, and he has written a second.

His work, in poetry and fiction, continues to cross genres, to explore and define the times in which we live. In the writing there is everything he would wish to save from the fire, all the tokens he will need.