A Great Poet
Jim September 26th, 2007
I want to talk about a great poet who passed away over a year ago: Leslie Norris. I met Norris when I was doing my dissertation on him some years back. Here I was a nobody graduate student and I called him on the phone. I explained what I was doing and that my dissertation was in part on him. “That’s hard luck on you,” he replied in his soft, Welsh lilting accent. After one telephone interview, I realized I would need more. So he invited me to stay with him at his Orem, Utah home. We sat in his garden, looking out over the Wasatch Range, where the last raw patches of glacial snow clung to the peaks in high summer and light splashed everywhere. We talked about Wordsworth, Keats, and Norris’ own poetry. We talked about his friend, Dylan Thomas and Norris confided to me that in his opinion, no one yet had written a biography that was fair to Dylan Thomas.
Norris was himself most often a free verse poet. But more often than readers realize, he was a formal poet. Like Frost, whose work his resembles, Norris’ formal and metric poetry was so subtly metrical, that a casual glance makes readers think that it is free verse. He used sometimes a Welsh form called cynghanedd, which is more complex than I want to try to explain here. And one of his finest poems is “The Ballad of Billy Rose”, a clearly metrical ballad and a profound piece. When people ask me about Norris and want to know a bit about him, I say, “Imagine a cross between Robert Frost and Dylan Thomas”. Of course, that’s a vast overgeneralization, but it will give anyone a ballpark idea of the fine poet so recently lost to us. Go out and get his Collected Poems. You will not regret it. Amazon has some used copies or you can get a new one straight from his small Welsh publisher, Seren, over the web. I will go on record to say that I believe him to be the finest British poet of the 20th century.