CURREY, R.N. This Other Planet. L.: Routledge, 1945. First Edition. Pp 50. Small 8vo, black cloth spine, light green paper-covered boards. Short 1/2 inch tear to margin of 2 leaves, ow fine in fine dj. 35.00


Ralph Nixon Currey (1907-2001)
Born in South Africa and studied at Wadham College, Oxford. In This Other Planet he wrote as an artillery officer of exile in a world of mechanistic killing.


Obituary: R. N. Currey
Independent, The (London), Nov 29, 2001 by Anthony Thwaite

R. N. CURREY was rightly proud of the fact that in 1945 T. S. Eliot wrote to him about the work contained in This Other Planet, telling Currey that it was "the best war poetry in the correct sense of the term that I have seen in these past years"......Ralph Nixon Currey was born in Mafeking, South Africa, in 1907, son of an English Methodist minister who had come out as a chaplain with the British troops at the end of the Boer War. His mother's grandparents had arrived in Natal as early as 1849.....He read History at Wadham College, Oxford, took a Diploma in Education there, and spent the next few years teaching on short-term contracts at different schools. But his appointment in 1934 to teach History and English at Colchester Royal Grammar School was crucial: except for his wartime army service, he spent the rest of his working life teaching there, until his retirement in 1973...... Currey was called up in 1941, at first into the Royal Corps of Signals, then transferring to the Royal Artillery, in which he was commissioned. He served in heavy artillery and radar in Britain, until in 1943 he went by sea to India (visiting South Africa on the way for the first time since his childhood), eventually serving with his gunners on the Burma frontier.

He was stimulated by India ("I found there, still going on, the Middle Ages I had read about when studying history at Oxford"), and some of his best earlier poems were written there. Being transferred as a Major to the Education Corps, he worked on army publications and in 1945, with the blessing of the then Viscount Wavell, co-edited the anthology Poems from India. ..............His first book of poems, Tiresias, had been published in 1940, but it was This Other Planet (1945) which attracted more attention,

Indian Landscape was a verse record of three years' service in India where he edited with R.V. Gibson the forces anthology Poems from India. Wrote British Council pamphlet Poets of the 1939-45 War (1960).