South China Sea is a poet's autobiography. Forgoing the props of conventional narrative, the book travels through space and time, revealing the moments in a life that anchor reality and constitute memory. In poems that compel us to remember and to re-evaluate our own personal stories, Norris travels back to a New York City childhood and to his years as a young man in the art and literary scene of Montreal, while moving forward in the present on a soul-changing journey through China. In the pages of South China Sea, memory and experience dance together through the complex maze of existence.
Red light! //
Tom is in the air. //
Artie says no, no, no /
to all this rehashing /
of Dada and Surrealism. //
A verb tied to a possessive /
handcuffed to an adjectivized /
noun. //
Tennis balls, no, /
goat feet. //
There's a simultaneity /
in the air, and Nancy says /
it just won't do. //
Lost
in the General,
misunderstanding.
Concise yet refreshingly open with language and structure, South China Sea is densely packed and deserves a slow, reflective summer read.
Robyn Fadden, The Montreal Review of Books
The poems of South China Sea are composed with a directness that even offer him as a tourist in his very skin; small moments, gestures and reminiscences lived and recalled at a slight distance. Norris isn’t a poet composing self-contained carved-diamond lyrics of exposition or wisdom, but one seeking the wisdom across a broader spectrum. To understand the nuance of his poems, one must read across a wider swath of his work, and a collection such as this is very much constructed as a singular project. “Nothing heroic in any of it,” he writes, to open the poem “LIFE,” “and yet it was life. / It was all that we had.” The wisdom of Norris’ lyrics emerge through the less obvious, the slow gradient of his lyric, using poetry as a way through which to articulate the moments of his own experience and connections.
rob mclennan, periodicities