Born in 1921 in Merthyr Tydfil, Leslie Norris was a prize-winning Welsh poet and short story writer who became a Humanities Professor of Creative Writing, a Karl G. Maeser Distinguished Faculty Lecturer, and poet-in-residence at Brigham Young University. Norris is the author of over thirty books of poetry and stories, with individual poems and stories appearing in over 200 periodicals. During his lifetime, his work received the Cholmondeley Poetry Prize, the David Higham Memorial Prize, the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Award, the AML Award, the AML Award for poetry and the Welsh Arts Council Senior Fiction Award. He received an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Glamorgan and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from BYU. Norris is the only writer to have been elected a fellow of both the Welsh Academy and England’s Royal Academy of Literature.
Norris’ parents were George and Mary Jane Norris: George Norris worked as a miner but after the First World War became a milkman due to health problems. Norris himself was a voracious reader and entranced by poetry at an early age; he was deeply influenced by the Welsh poets Dylan Thomas and Vernon Watkins. Norris began publishing his own poems at age 17. He dropped out of school due to financial difficulties, then worked for the next two years as a rates clerk in Merthyr’s Town Hall.
Disinterested in remaining in the small industrial town in which he was born, Norris joined the Royal Air Force at 19 during the Second World War, training briefly to be a pilot before he got blood poisoning from steel ropes and was discharged in June 1941. Norris then left Wales to enroll in the teacher training programs at the City of Coventry College and the University of Southampton. In 1948 he married Catherine (Kitty) Morgan, a chemist, and taught at various schools around the U.K.. Between 1952 and 1958, Norris taught in Yeovil and Bath, then moved on to work as headmaster of Westergate School, Chichester.
Norris’ first collection of poetry was published in 1941, but it wasn’t until his collection Finding Gold was published in 1967 by Hogarth Press that his reputation grew; two more collections swiftly followed: Ransoms (1970), which won the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, and Mountains, Polecats, Pheasants (1974). Norris’ growing literary reputation brought him fame in America and, in 1973, he left England with Kitty to be the visiting Theodore Roethke Memorial Chair of Poetry at the University of Washington. His time in America proved to be creatively fulfilling, and he eventually gave up his current teaching post at Bognor Regnis in England in order to live off his writing. A noted fiction writer as well as poet, Norris’ first collection of short stories, Sliding (1978), soon appeared, which won the David Higham Memorial Prize; his second, The Girl from Cardigan (1988), won a Welsh Arts Council Prize.
In 1983, at age 61, Norris was appointed Christiansen Professor of Poetry at BYU, a visiting position meant to last six months; Norris stayed for the next 20 years. Norris proved to be a popular and widely admired poet in Utah, especially with his colleagues and students at BYU. Though Norris himself was not Mormon, he felt welcomed by his LDS students and colleagues, and in interviews called himself “an honorary member” of his local LDS ward, allowing that some of the religious symbolism from the Book of Mormon had influenced his later work. Of Utah itself, Norris admitted in an interview, “Although it is a very beautiful place, it is mainly because of the people we are here.”
Famed for his dynamic reading style, Norris gave numerous public readings and recorded his poetry for the BBC’s school programs. During his life, he published translations, reviews, and biographies, and wrote often of his pre-war experiences in a Wales deeply affected by the Great Depression. He was a candidate for the position of England's poet laureate, a position that went instead to Ted Hughes in 1984. The American poet and writer James Dickey said of Norris that “poets would kill for [his] authenticity of voice.” Today Norris is considered one of the most important Welsh writers of the post-war period, and is fondly remembered by his former colleagues and students at BYU.
Leslie Norris died on April 6, 2006 in Provo.
Work
Autumn Elegy
Autumn Elegy
September. The small summer hangs its suns
On the chestnuts, and the world bends slowly
Out of the year. On tiles of the low barns
The lingering swallows rest in this timely
Warmth, collecting it. Standing in the garden,
I too feel its generosity; but would not leave.
Time, time to lock the heart. Nothing is sudden
In Autumn, yet the long, ceremonial passion of
The year’s death comes quickly enough
As form veins shut on the sluggish blood
And the numberless protestations of the leaf
Are mapped on the air. Live wood
Was scarce and bony where I lived as a boy.
I am not accustomed to such oppulent
Panoply of dying. Yet, if I stare
Unmoved at the flaunting, silent
Agony in the country before a resonant
Wind anneals it, I am not diminished, it is not
That I do not see well, do not exult,
But that I remember again what
Young men of my own time died
In the Spring of their living and could not turn
To this. They died in their flames, hard
War destroyed them. Now as the trees burn
In the beginning glory of Autumn
I sing for all green deaths as I remember
In their broken Mays, and turn
The years back for them, every red September.
Published in Leslie Norris: The Complete Poems, Seren Press
The Camels of the Kings
The Camels of the Kings
'The Camels, the Kings' Camels, Haie-aie!
Saddles of polished leather, stained red and purple,
Pommels inlaid with ivory and beaten gold,
Bridles of silk embroidery, worked with flowers.
The Camels, the Kings' Camels!
'We are groomed with silver combs,
We are washed with perfumes.
The grain of richest Africa is fed to us,
Our dishes are silver.
Like cloth-of-gold glisten our sleek pelts.
Of all camels, we alone carry the Kings!
Do you wonder that we are proud?
That our hooded eyes are contemptuous?
As we sail past the tented villages
They beat their copper gongs after us.
'The windswift, the desert racers. See them!
Faster than gazelles, faster than hounds,
Haie-aie! The Camels, the Kings' Camels!'
The sand drifts in puffs behind us,
The glinting quartz, the fine, hard grit.
Do you wonder that we look down our noses?
Do you wonder we flare our superior nostrils?
All night we have run under the moon,
Without effort, breathing lightly,
Smooth as a breeze over the desert floor,
One white star our compass.
We have come to no palace, no place
Of towers and minarets and the calling of servants,
But a poor stable in a poor town.
So why are we bending our crested necks?
Why are our proud heads bowed
And our eyes closed meekly?
Why are we outside this hovel,
Humbly and awkwardly kneeling?
How is it that we know the world is changed?
The Hawk's Eye: Two Poems
The Hawk’s Eye: Two Poems
1.
The hawk carries his eye
out of swinging altitudes
higher than winter.
Above his locked feet,
hunched in wet feathers,
he rages in larches.
It is the snow brings him down.
Bland snow has covered
the rock of the precipice.
Is the hawk to hang
above so changed a world?
He knows the quiet architecture
of high places, the black
argument of granite,
but the snow’s in his eye
and he shrieks in temper.
I could use that harsh gaze
above the crested summit
of fluted snow, and the curved
stretches or ledges.
I could look down
between the grasp of my arms
on the still air
and see in the dark
the stars of dark farms
in the huddle of winter,
their byres shut to the night
and their eyes turned to the fire.
I could see the men
I might have become
turn out of their stiff clothes
to sleep the cold night, fatigued,
under heavy blankets
woven by their mothers.
I could see a man,
perturbed, hearing foxes bark,
move with his lantern
across the muffled yard
into his barn
where the spent chaff,
light, lighter than air,
will rise in his little flame,
climb in the small heat,
mostes, thin dust of old harvests,
until the man turns,
grumbling at the cold,
thumbs shut his latch
against the high snow
where the hawk is at watch.
2.
Who comes out of these hills, these woods,
from the small white house in a hollow,
from the summer river between ferns?
Who travels the rough lanes worn
by the stumbling dung-cart? They carry
among the bundled clutter of clothes and pans
and the rattle of what is portable
the whole of their lives. That one,
larky, long in the leg, red-bearded, he
will not come back. Already his grave
is marked, he will not see his grandchildren.
The young one, who knows the flight
of lark and pipit and holds their bald
nestlings within his hands, will fall apprentice
to a butcher. He will run screaming
from the slaughterhouse, his eyes full
of hacked red meat, the round cries
of animals will follow him all his roads.
He will walk through the dark lots,
through brutal labour in furnaces,
through human betrayal. His sisters
will curb their thin tongues, laugh bitterly
and in secret; endure. They will never
return. It is I who recall their ghosts
to the house lost under the hill, their
wavering dust so frail it does not stir
the powder of the roads. It is I
who people the lanes of homecoming
and build the fallen chimneys stone by stone
so the doused fires will carry the echoes
of old warmth, and the fields hear more
than the hawk’s voice, and the silence after.
Published in The London Review of Books, September 1983
A Sea in the Desert
A Sea in the Desert
1.
A little sea
in the night
ran its inch of tide
about the bole of the peach tree,
hesitated,
came fawning to my door,
cringed,
fell away.
Its small crests,
its ebb,
broke my sleep.
2.
A little sea
was running in the desert.
It came in
under the edges of the breeze,
a true sea,
sharpening the air with salt.
Filling hourly through the night.
It remembered white ships,
clippers out of China
freighted with tea and roses,
sea-swans
holding gales in their wings,
storms off the coast of fragrant Spain, snarling.
It hurled
against my walls
its gathering whips and drums,
dropped away,
its throat rattling with pebbles.
3.
I got up,
opened my door
to this unbelievable sea.
My yard was lit by silent moonlight.
Parched grasshoppers chirrupped in the ditches.
4.
But still the sea broke
on the beaches of my ears.
My skull was a shell
holding the noisy tides
pouring unseen over the desert.
5.
A man is moon to his own sea—
he draws it after him,
like a dog it follows him
the days of his life.
All that night I heard the sea make
and ebb, a sea formed
of grains of remembered oceans,
fed by rains and rivers
of days I have finished with.
It carried old sticks in its mouth.
In the morning a tide’s detritus,
twigs, small round stones, a can,
lay in uneven lines
on the charred grass.
6.
A hermit thrush sings for me
in dry arroyos its liquid note.
I have heard in the desert
unrecognised birds, charmers,
lift up their single whistles,
long separated, distant,
purified by distance, among
the grassless dunes.
I have thought them calling me.
I have heard the voices
of an invisible sea
whispering with boys’
voices, heard in its dry waves
the pattering of boys’ feet
through the built canyons of the past.
I have heard
such singing. The mocking-bird
has sung for me. Each day
the waters of that sea
are rising blindly to the full.
Published in The New Criterion, September 1983.
Bibliography
Poetry
Tongue of Beauty. London, Favil Press, 1941.
Poems. London, Falcon Press, 1946.
The Ballad of Billy Rose. Leeds, Northern House, 1964.
The Loud Winter. Cardiff, Triskel Press, 1967.
Finding Gold. London, Chatto and Windus, 1967.
Curlew. St. Brelade, Jersey, Armstrong, 1969.
Ransoms. London, Chatto and Windus, 1970; Newtown, Powys, Gwasg Gregynog, 1987.
His Last Autumn. Rushden, Northamptonshire, Sceptre Press, 1972.
Mountains, Polecats, Pheasants and Other Elegies. London, Chatto and Windus, 1973.
Stone and Fern. Winchester, Southern Arts Association, 1973.
At the Publishers'. Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, Priapus, 1976.
Ravenna Bridge. Knotting, Bedfordshire, Sceptre Press, 1977.
Islands Off Maine. Cranberry Isles, Maine, Tidal Press, 1977.
Merlin and the Snake's Egg. New York, Viking Press, 1978.
Hyperion. Knotting, Bedfordshire, Sceptre Press, 1979.
Water Voices. London, Chatto and Windus—Hogarth Press, 1980.
Walking the White Fields: Poems 1967–1980. Boston, Little Brown, 1980.
A Tree Sequence. Seattle, Spring Valley Press, 1984.
Selected Poems. Bridgend, Glamorgan, Poetry Wales Press, 1986.
Sequences. Layton, Utah, Gibbs Smith, 1988.
Norris's Ark. Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Tidal Press, 1988.
A Sea in the Desert. Bridgend, Glamorgan, Seren, 1989.
Collected Poems. Bridgend, Glamorgan, Seren, 1996.
Recording: Poems, with Dannie Abse, Argo, 1974.
Short Stories
Sliding. New York, Scribner, 1976; London, Dent, 1978.
The Girl from Cardigan. Bridgend, Glamorgan, Seren, and Layton, Utah, Gibbs Smith, 1988.
Collected Stories. Bridgend, Glamorgan, Seren, 1996.
Other
Glyn Jones. Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1973.
Editor, Vernon Watkins 1906–1967. London, Faber, 1970.
Editor, Andrew Young: Remembrance and Homage. Cranberry Isles, Maine, Tidal Press, 1978.
Editor, The Mabinogion, translated by Lady Charlotte Guest. London, Folio Society, 1980.
Translator, with Alan Keele, The Sonnets to Orpheus, by Rainer Maria Rilke, Columbia, South Carolina, Camden House, 1989.
Translator, The Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke, Columbia, South Carolina, Camden House, 1993.
Links
Literary Worlds: An Exhibit of Leslie Norris' Life and Work