The blurb on the back cover of Heaven's Gate, Tonys Curtis's latest collection of poems, describes the author as "one of Wales' best poets" and goes on to characterise his work as "formally astute, subtle and persuasive... evincing enviable clarity and insight...", propositions with which it would be hard to disagree. Yet "best" is an imprecise term, more suitable for advertisement than criticism, and the question of what constitutes "formally astute, subtle and persuasive poetry" these days remains wide open. So before venturing to review or evaluate these poems, I want to suggest that they are above all poems of their period - our period.

Whether English, Welsh, Irish or American, the kind of poetry I want to identify will be familiar to most poetry readers today, though as a mode, I suppose it goes back only as far as the late 1960s and the wildly applauded publication of Seamus Heaney's first collections. What was so new and wonderful about Heaney? Well, the frankness and warmth of his personality, for one thing. Here was "confessional poetry" if you like, but instead of the Freudian angst and ego-centred violence we had come to expect from the Americans - Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath - here was a collection of affectionate, tenderly explorative memories of a rural childhood, written by a poet whose credentials were all home made. What a relief, what a pleasure these poems were to hear! And Heaney's placing was for him as fortunate as his timing. A far-sighted Catholic from war-torn Northern Ireland, dedicated to his vocation and with a true poet's ear - at the time nothing more rooted and nourishing could have happened to poetry in the English language.

To Heaney's immense credit, excessive fame has not induced him to "go pop" or to sell out to university theorists. Over the years, though his themes have remained much the same, his poetry has developed in complexity. No one could complain that his work these days is either provincial or too easy. Nonetheless, Heaney and others such as John Montague and Michael Longley in Ireland opened the door to a poetry which, though not confessional in the American sense, is personally specific, home-grounded and unabashedly confidential. If "confessional" poetry was a mid-century innovation of discontented Americans, "confidential" poetry has come to be the principal mode of expression for a great many politically sensitive, ambitious yet reader-friendly poets - of both sexes - in the United Kingdom today.

It would be absurd, of course, to attribute the rise of confidential poetry to Heaney and the Irish alone. With the passing of R.S. Thomas in Wales and Ted Hughes in England, very little of what used to be a dominant strain of spiritual or mythological poetry seems to have found new voices. At the same time, after Larkin, English lyricism, together with its economy and metrical astringency, became a rare exception as poetry more and more eased itself into the seemingly more democratic harness of free verse. In the past two or three decades, Arts Council schemes, marketing strategies, lucrative poetry competitions and above all, the widespread availability of creative writing courses, have provided poetry with a new purpose. The aim of these new "initiatives" has been partly to broaden the concept of poetry and thus remove from it the stigma of control by an intellectual elite; and partly to connect people as individuals, to get people talking about themselves, sympathising with each other, whose lives might otherwise be laid waste by the meaningless pursuit of material advancement or the soulless acquisition of consumer goods.

The concept of a people's poetry is not, of course, new. Throughout most of its long history, poetry has been nothing less than the language bond - historical and religious - that tied the tribe or nation together. In due course, civilization and widespread literacy gave it a political role. In both Britain and America during the nineteenth century, the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Scott, Byron, Wordsworth were regarded as indispensable to every school child's education. What is different about today's populism is that poetry is no longer regarded as an art provided by a few for the many; instead it has become a communal occupation, an open field for anyone who wants to try their hand at "creativity". Looking back three quarters of a century, the great Modernists now seem suspiciously elitist. The poetry of Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Stevens represented, perhaps, a last flicker of hope for a high culture often associated today with social inequality and colonialism, though Modernism can be understood, too, as a defensive or defiant movement, designed to counteract some of the hideously dehumanising elements of contemporary life.

And of course, what we call Post-Modernism has not been able to humanise contemporary life, either, although it looks to be trying hard. In reality, it has split poetry pretty much in two. The older universities, uncertain of their democratic credentials and vulnerable to accusations of social inequality, have practically succeeded in turning poetry into a theoretical branch of the social sciences. Meanwhile, ordinary people who seek education wherever it is offered - at the Arvon centres or in sixth-form colleges or via the internet and television - have taken up their pens and computers, deciding that poetry is not so much an art they want to inherit and revere as a line of immediate communication, a skill to be learned and passed on to others, something like journalism. And this partly explains why what I have called "confidential" poetry has become so ubiquitous - or perhaps the more appropriate word would be contagious.

Still, only the most curmudgeonly literary snob could find it in his heart to deny the social value of this recent burgeoning of poetry, from class room to cyber space, that has come to be the emotional equivalent of a cottage industry. Poetry written with the door open, as it were, makes friends wherever it is read or taught, for one of its hallmarks is that it can be taught. It is clear from everything he writes that Tony Curtis, Professor of Poetry at the University of Glamorgan, sets great store by the teachability of the arts, and his own poetry reflects his conviction that people will like it once they get to know him. He assumes, for example, that his readers will want to know that his dead father's "heavy green check" trousers have become symbols of his own more prudent preparation for the end. He'd like us to feel his nervous pride, sitting in Kings College Chapel while Bron (yes, his daughter) is being interviewed for Cambridge. He invites us to share seven family letters in sonnet form with his son Gareth at Amherst, and he is sure we will understand that his passion for golf relates to his sensitive concern for other people and for nature. He is instinctively generous. He wants us to know how much he enjoys his life and how privileged he feels, having extended his appreciations to New York and Massachusetts. As a poet, he is most persuasive when he writes, out of personal happiness, of the unhappy world he reads about in the newspaper or views on television…