The Real Thing Strange

As poet and critic Empson did more than anyone to re-shape the practice of literary interpretation with his extraordinary powers of insight, verbal analysis, and deeply searching reflective commentary. Christopher Norris has been reading, teaching, and writing about Empson for the past five decades and here returns to one further engagement in a sequence of poems that range over many aspects of its subject’s richly creative, intellectually adventurous, and - in the best sense - eccentric career. That sense will be brought into sharper focus as the reader is introduced, through these formally structured rhyming and metrical verses, to a creative-critical mind unlike any other in its complex inter-connectedness and capacity for yoking together diverse areas of thought and experience in new, revelatory ways. That Norris’s poetry owes a great deal to Empson in formal, thematic and intellectual terms will be evident to anyone who has read Seven Types or the slim but sharply distinctive verse output of his rather short-lived poetic career. Many commentators have started out by declaring Empson undoubtedly a genius yet ended up by confessing their inability to say just where - in which of his manifold gifts - that genius principally lies. With his poems Norris hopes to make good the claim through a different, generically more flexible and creative-exploratory line of approach.