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