"Mischief" is a most diminished vice. The Romantics, at least, had the Byronic hero with his Satanic possibilities.
orris' most recent
"Report" book, Report
on the Second
Half of the Twentieth Century(1988) is mainly a gathering of previously
published shorter pieces. "Clouds: A Sequence of Days,"
dated Jan. 2-June 11, 1980 (95), is the only new work. It
was written in the same year as the crisis-ridden
Autokinesis. Though less negative than that book, this
sequence does express repeatedly the wish for a translation
into a higher, more "spiritual," realm which runs through
all of Norris' poetry of the eighties: "if only we could be
freed/of our imperfections, gross matter/that anchors us to
earth"(89). The poems are a little too much like
clouds--wispy and insubstantial.
nthe House of
No(1991)returns
to puzzle once more over the question of poetry. Louis
Dudek, commenting on this debate in his Introduction, says
that "the danger is always the possibility of rejecting art,
in favour of life, as suggested in some of Norris' poems.
The triumph is in the recording of the tension, and in
writing the poem that is a record of the holy spontaneous
life that is eternalized" (10). In one way he is right; in
another he is very wrong.
his four-part book
follows the Norris on a quest for affirmation. In "Tangled
Roots," the first part of the book, the poems are filled
with negative images and subjects: war, car accidents, dying
leaves. Norris is in crisis and questioning his belief in
his vocation: "He dreamed of a life that has managed to
elude him, has growing sympathy for people he once deemed
failures. He envies youth for its lustre, age for its
wisdom, though he suspects it's a
