ow that he has found his answer and is through with the debate (for the moment, at least) the language has become far more concrete and the images stronger. He is done with pondering the abstract and is affirming, in true romantic fashion, the sanctity of the ordinary and the everyday. It is a breathtaking conclusion, and comes about because Norris is wise enough to know that the only way to succeed at art is to embrace life first. n the same year Norris also published Alphabet of Desire. The book consists of two parts: "The Ascent of Spring" and "Alphabet of Desire". The former could be subtitled "and the descent of winter". It is a mixture of poems and prose pieces. The prose pieces comments on the poems or on the poetic process in general. They read like fragments of a statement on poetics. Winter and spring are treated metaphorically in the poetry and the prose. The longing for winter to end and the desire for spring's arrival runs parallel with the urge to write a book and the struggle against impediments to that end. Just as spring is a re-creation of life that winter has killed writing is a re-creation of the writer into another form. His rebirth as a poet grows out of the rebirth springs brings to the world: "What I was doing waiting for spring to arrive, my life to revive, my poetic powers to reemerge and tell me who I should be" (23). But winter, with its absences, its cill of death, also breeds the poet for "out of emptiness/a poet is born, the eye catching/at the world" (23). This prose/lyric sequence marks a leap forward in his internal debate because it shows him moving beyond the simple opposites of winter vs spring, death vs creativity into a synthetic view that acknowledges that the poet requires the disparate elements, the light and the dark, the positive and the negative, if he is to have a whole vision of life.