The Empty Air: New Poems 2006-2012

"His work is both original and entertaining. . . . Connor does not simply report events. He vividly recreates them, shaping each scene with the skill and care of a novelist . . . his work remains clear-headed, intelligent, and immensely readable."—Dana Gioia in the Hudson Review

Tony Connor's poetry is often partly or wholly autobiographical, frequently returning to the characters and places of his Lancashire childhood. His new poems mix fantasy and reality in unexpected ways, always with the unobtrusive hand of a skilled craftsman. They are set equally in Britain and the United States, where he has spent half his life. From the personal ruminations of "Reading at Midnight" via the Agatha Christie satire "Death at the Vicarage," to the riddling "Account of a Possible Coup d'Etat," Connor's poetry constantly entertains and surprises.

From "Hotel de la Soledad":

The stranger flirts, with a sort of abstract grace,

using her cane and mine as a limping pretext

to stop me and converse on the courtyard cobbles.

Seized by her vaunting beauty, I am vexed

and surprised to be a man of seventy nine,

still ready to let my life turn on a chance –

if that's what this is. My gap-toothed smile a sign

of lifelong, optimistic, ignorance.

Born in 1930, Tony Connor has lived mainly in Middletown, Connecticut, where he was a professor of English at Wesleyan University, since 1971. He spends the summers in London. He left school at fourteen and worked in Manchester as a textile designer for many years.

Connors abiding preoccupations continue into his eighties: his own life and the lives around him, passing time and its traps, poetry and its transfiguration of the commonplace. Yet all is not solemn as Connor extends his range into comic verse and dramatic dialogue. His new poems mix fantasy and reality in unexpected ways, always with the unobtrusive hand of a skilled craftsman.