As Knowing Goes and Other Poems

This collection drops a boulder into the still waters of British poetry. It is wide-ranging, hard-hitting, and above all ambitious, both in vision and variety of poetic forms. Norris moves rhythmically through politics, philosophy, and science always with an eye for the particular, always in pursuit of the bigger picture. He has an extraordinary ability to blow the dust off our habitual perceptions, charge up our minds and make the language sing.  He finds live connections between an anchorite and our own boxed existence, he quarrels with T. S. Eliot and jokes about endorphins. Each poem stands for what we are in danger of losing; our intelligence, our learning, our feeling, our connection with history, and with each other. The volume is one of those points of light that Auden said the just exchange with one another; so read and pass the word: here are poems to sustain in the dark times and give us hope for the future.  -GARY DAY, author of Literary Criticism: A New HistoryThese poems eschew the confessional laxity and structural imprecision that typify so much contemporary verse. Christopher Norris takes seriously Ezra Pound’s dictum that poetry should be at least as well written as good prose while exceeding that basic requirement through a range of expressive and formal-prosodic resources. His poems are unfailingly dynamic, the sense hard-won from rigorous forms which at times serve an almost dialogical function, nuancing assertions and scotching simple conclusions. These are the values that Norris here exemplifies in verse that is at once an eloquent present-day defense of poetry and, by implication, a searching critique of various turns in its development over the past half-century. -NIALL GILDEA, author of Jacques Derrida’s Cambridge AffairCHRISTOPHER NORRIS is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cardiff in Wales. He has published more than thirty books on topics in philosophy, literary theory, the history of ideas, cultural politics, and musical criticism. Socrates at Verse and Other Philosophical Poems was published by Parlor Press in 2021.