Sunbirds in your soul

This coming Monday evening's the second zoom launch of Gripscapes Newly Selected Poems by Norman Morrissey - Jim published it last year, when you were already four years gone.

As we did for the initial launch, your old friends and colleagues, Jim, John, Brian and I will read from your poems. In preparation, I've leaped and clambered through our lists anew. I say 'leaped and clambered', rather than 'read', because your rhythms, fretworked with consonants as they often are, make a terrain less for my mind (which was, after all, never cradled in English), than places for my feet and heart to keep moving, delicately, through.

When I first read your name, late in 2008, I was turning Triptych over in my hands at the local bookstore. What drew me in, to its pages, was not the poet, it was the man: You. I had to admit, in the dim light of that back corner of the shop, where the poetry books were, that I was sensing the heart of a better human being, a soul way more wise than I was. Someone capable of the most exquisite compassion, the starkest, most resonant self-reflection, carrying love not as mere wish or willed choice (though it was that, too), but as a basic instinct.

John, in his rich, fine Introduction to your book, discusses 'In Defence of a Drab Sunbird' as a poem of courage, with "much to say on behalf of human freedoms, communally and individually" - and it is from that poem I want to yank lines out of context, to serve something here, something, which you told me you valued more than anything else: a hard and simple ambition that linked us, which was to become a better human being.

"simply being who I am" you write, "affirming the holy freedom of my own sweet will" -

no cock bird performing on a public twig

- but nevertheless demonstrating, all on my own,

the independent self-sovereignty 

I protest

I want for everyone  

1990-03-29

The lines attest a gorgeous solidarity with unostentatious femaleness; but there's also a lunge, beyond that, at an original wildness there, that part in us that links to the animal world, a flexive world beckoning humans forward to conscious awareness of our self-delighting, self-appeasing, self-affrighting souls.

To pore over the poems in Gripscapes is to do more than read poetry. It is really to witness a man setting an example, doing his best, against pretty shitty odds at times, using his mother tongue as a chisel to carve himself, finally into something not drab at all, but truly shimmering: a human.

Norman Morrissey, July 2010

 

No sense of farewell - reflections on the the launch of Sweet Nothings

The manager called to ask, "How many chairs shall we put out, and how would you like them placed?"
The waiter said, "We have created and printed a special menu for you."
Later I saw that he had pinned one onto a board and framed it in his own hand with coki hearts and curlicues.
Guests arrived, including some who had travelled far that day, and the reading began. The rain that had threatened to fall, restrained itself. No thunder disturbed the quiet event.
The gardener, whom I had invited, came on foot.
"I want to walk," he had said, when we'd passed by car and offered him a lift.
He sat all by himself: solitary and composed. When he had finished his meal, he rose and came over to thank me, before leaving.
The others ate and talked together. The owner of the establishment bought one book for himself and one to donate to the library. He asked me to inscribe it: To the people of Hogsback.

Back home, a poem appeared:

After the launch

We sit in the courtyard,

wind hisses through 

the oak trees' leaves,

our voices lift and  fall,

soft and full,

mingling for an evening

well-spent.

I also received a few kind messages, from dear friends, after the event:

"Beautiful evening ...
You sat in your chair like a queen:
Reigning over words
So serene."

"A lovely evening well-spent indeed. Thank you for the gift of the evening, and for the gift of your poetry."

"It was indeed an evening well spent! You managed the evening with style and warmth that we all could take into our beings forever with no sense of farewell."

Indeed. My heart carries all this wherever I go.

The roll-back

Four launch/ reading events -
1. Hogsback (The Edge Mountain Retreat), 12/10/19;
2. Grahamstown (Reddits, Cafe D'Vine), 25/10/19;
3. Cape Town: Tokai (The Book Shoppe), 4/11/19;
4. Cape Town: Claremont (Exclusive Books, Cavendish), 5/11/19

Now, at my laptop at my parents' dining room table, I sit opposite my mother, quietly reading in her wheelchair. Her entire left side is paralysed and her body has as good as no independence anymore. She holds her lapidary brochure in her right hand. Flash photos of cut and labelled gems, displayed on royal red backgrounds, gaze at me.

My parents' presence at the Cape launch of Greater Matter at Exclusive Books, Cavendish, Claremont, on Tuesday was one of the most precious gifts to me personally.
"If I could, I would have got up and embraced you," my mother said.

Having had to have been so publicly present, both online and off, for the sake of marketing and selling my book, has felt unnatural, even stressful.

Don't get me wrong. I love reading aloud to people, I love intimate public events, which poetry readings mostly are. I love the microphone, which allows for whisper-soft words to slink into listener's hearts. And I love the fact that readers have bought Greater Matter and are being nourished by it.

But the tide is rolling back now.

I look forward to being in the arms of my beloved. I look forward to composing poems again, applauded by the stars and grasses. Perhaps more people will come towards me, who have felt themselves privately heard, or who are questing for more of the chime they sense hums in my book. 

There'll be further books, further readings, to build and nurture the "good/ By quiet natures understood" (W.B.Yeats, Prayer for my Daughter).

I thank Exclusive Books, Cavendish, and Eva van Belle for the photographs from Tuesday's launch.