THE MATTER OF RHYME

POETRY/PHILOSOPHY

The poetry of ideas, a long neglected genre, has now found a vigorous and resourceful champion in Christopher Norris. Hitherto best known as philosopher and literary theorist, he has treated that genre to a full-scale modern revival of singular scope and ambition. His poems combine intellectual agility with a verse-music both keen-eared and frequently haunting. This latest collection sees Norris at the top of his bent as lyric poet, poet-philosopher, verse-essayist, political satirist, social commentator, and skilful re-worker of traditional verse-forms to suit contemporary contexts and concerns. It exhibits all the wit and erudition that readers will have come to expect, along with a marked broadening of purview and heightened stylistic virtuosity. These poems engage with topics ranging from the personal (though never private-confessional) to the deeply enquiring (though never abstruse) and the forcefully political (though never excluding issues that transcend the narrowly partisan). Above all they make the case for viewing rhyme, meter, and prosodic structure as intrinsically a part of verse-practice and a source of everything that is most distinctive and valuable in poetry. It is through those jointly enabling and constraining elements that Norris’s poems enact the paradoxical relation between freedom and necessity, in literature as in life. To that extent they stand as a formalist riposte to the free-verse orthodoxy that has captured the fashionable high ground across large swathes of current poetic theory and practice. At the same time they offer plentiful evidence that formalism need not equate with austerity but can just as well go along with unbuttoned creativity, expressive power, and verbal inventiveness.

“Christopher Norris is one of the most erudite, original, and adventurous English-language poets of our time.”  TERRY EAGLETON, Distinguished Professor of English Literature, University of Lancaster

“Chris Norris’s revival of the verse-essay and verse-monologue is a rich feast of wit, erudition, and inventiveness, nicely spiced with hard-hitting satire, caustic humour, and touches of lyrical affection. Here is a distinctive poetic voice, comfortable in its medium, unflaggingly readable, offering hours of pleasure and reflection. A true delight!”  PETER LAMARQUE, Professor of Philosophy, University of York