​
On the Poetry of Norman Morrissey and Silke Heiss
​Review by Troy Camplin

Tryst: A Dialogue of Love Poems (2012)
Learn the Dance: Another Year of Love in Poems (2013)
Hogsback Hiku (2013)
Simply in Love: Love and Poetry Play On! (2014)
To the Far Horizon: Poems Further Unfolding a Love (2015)
Love Letters to the Earth (2016)
A Shell Held to the Ear (2017)

In South Africa is a group of poets called the Ecca Poets eccapoets.blogspot.com/, a group that has been together for thirty years now. Norman Morrissey was a founding member of the Ecca Poets. He died in 2017, spending the last six years with his wife, Silke Heiss. She, too, is a poet, and the two of them created seven books of poems in which are collected their poems, mostly to and for each other. The exceptions are Hogsback Hiku, which has poems about the place where Morrissey and Heiss lived, and Love Letters to the Earth, which are nature poems.

Love is a unifying theme in all of these collections, though. The love poems between husband and wife are obvious enough, but Hogback Hiku are love poems to a particular place, and Love Letters to the Earth announces its theme in the title.
In the love poems between husband and wife, we see a very distinct difference between the two poets. Morrissey in these poems is a minimalist — he writes short, clear, rational verse as though he were a little unsure about expressing his feelings. Heiss, on the other hand, is a maximalist. Her poems burst with energy and imagery that fully expresses her feelings of love to her husband.
Being a maximalist writer myself, my own preference is for Heiss’s poems; but this doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the concision of Morrissey’s verse, especially as I continued reading and began to appreciate more and more his minimalist aesthetics. At the same time, because these poems are a sort of dialogue between a loving husband and wife, one hates to “pick a favorite” so to speak, because you feel like you are betraying the one for the other, and thus betraying both a little, since you know that part of what each loved in the other was the ability to render words into poetry.
To compare, let’s compare a pair of poems on the same theme: kissing.

Trout
‘Trout’ sounds
like the German ‘traut’,
which means ‘familiar’ and ‘trusted’.
So when you lurched
your tongue
into my mouth
like a fly on the line --
I leaped up, willingly lusted.

Spring
When we kissed in the gloaming
— each busy
about our own immediate recent track --
you said it was good to be attacked
by someone
you trusted
Ever since
I’ve a new spring tautening
in my back.

In Silke Heiss’s “Trout,” we start off with a bit of a language lesson, a foundation for the punning behind the poem. A doubleness is thus established in the poem — between two languages, English and German (signifying the fact of Heiss having been born in Germany and thus no doubt being a native German speaker), as well as the doubleness inherent in the aural punning of the sound “trout,” whose double meaning builds the rest of the poem, and the double meaning inherent in all metaphor, including the metaphor of the kiss causing her to act like a fish on a line. One will also notice that she’s drawing attention to sounds in the poem, saying such in the first line, where she draws the aural parallel between “trout” and “traut”. Do notice, though, that she has a strong repetition of the “l” sound: lurched, line, leaped, and lusted, but also fly and willingly. When you pronounce these words, the tongue lurches out to touch your top lip — she thus has you enact the lines “So when you lurched / your tongue”. There is full body participation in reading/speaking this poem.

Morrissey’s poem, Spring, is much more spare and he uses much harder sounds. Words like “track,” “attacked,” “trusted” and “tautening” create tension. All of this builds, of course, to the final stanza, where this tension both reaches its explicit peak, and is simultaneously released in the overall meaning — that this new love is making him feel younger (one meaning of “new spring”) and making him proud, standing taller, walking more upright (which is what a tautening spring would do to a structure). Further, the title “Spring” lends itself to yet another definition” since if one is being “attacked,” the one attacking would spring on you.
Both poems make use of double meanings of sounds, though Heiss does so using two words from two language, while Morrissey triples down on the meanings of the word “spring.” Each, as we can see, is complex, but their complexities emerge in different ways, though in both it’s through sound.

Of course, any good poet is building his or her poem up from sound. I have found the best poems I have written where those where I intended first and foremost to play with sounds (especially when compared with poems that came about to express an idea). In these two poems, though, it seems most likely that the sounds emerged naturally from the emotions each was trying to express. One gets the feeling that Heiss is more expressive of her excitement over this new love relationship, while he is much more on guard, tense, and thus not quite as openly expressive of his own excitement, which is nonetheless there.

We see, as we progress through the years, through each collection of poems, the ups and downs found in any relationship, but the continued enthusiasm of Heiss in her poems to him, and his increasing willingness to express his feelings for her, are evident. Consider this poem from the last book the coauthored:

Make me know
You back from your ramblings of duty
make me know
my days
are quietly held in shape
by your being here
— how
the world and its meanings
are not just my
responsibility.

This is a much softer poem by Morrissey, one that expresses his tenderness and appreciation for Heiss. His days are now structured around her, and he feels her absence when she’s gone. The word “how” hanging there by itself, with that extra pause created with the dash that comes at the beginning of the line (rather than at the end, where most poets would place it) creates an implied question “how?” — as in, how can I do anything without you now? — only to have the “how” shift into “how//the world and its meanings/are not just my /responsibility,” meaning he feels a certain burden having been lifted off of him by having her in his life. He perhaps sees, in the poetry she writes (and in the woman he knows), a shared meaning and understanding of the world that will carry on even past his death, so long as she is alive, so long as she is writing poetry.

This collection of poetry is well worth your time. Both poets are masters at their craft, and both poets create strong imagery to help make their meaning. There is an attention to language and sounds that contributes to this natural meaning-making, and though both are academics, neither is writing “academic” poetry in the worse sense of the term. Rather, they allow the music of the poetry to speak the unspeakable, and the meaning to emerge in that liminal space poetry creates between what language says and what it cannot say and, thus, must be silent about. This is the role of all great poetry.

It is a shame Silke Heiss only had a half dozen years with Norman Morrissey before he passed away. It is equally a shame that we have thus been robbed of Morrissey’s continued emotional growth that had been a consequence of their relationship. Perhaps we can comfort ourselves in the fact that Heiss continues to write her splendid verse.

WRITTEN BY Troy CamplinFollow
I am the author of “Diaphysics” and “Hear the Screams of the Butterfly,” and a consultant, poet, playwright, and interdisciplinary scholar.
This review first appeared on medium.com/@troycamplin/on-the-poetry-of-norman-morrissey-and-silke-heiss-df1f32c85911

Staying Hungry
(Ecca Poets 2019)
Review by Marike Beyers

Staying Hungry is the 2019 anthology published by the ECCA Poets – a group of mainly Eastern Cape writers who put forward the first of these in July 1989, a good 30 years ago! Originating from an art and writers’ group at Fort Hare, Alice, the group has since lost members, but also expanded, including more voices from further afield. Each poet is given a generous portion of the book and, broadly speaking, shares a sense of keen observation of the world and their own responses within it and a concern with expression, mostly in the form of writing itself.
 
Brian Walter, who recently published a new collection Allegories of the Everyday, opens the anthology. These poems convey a reflective and somewhat mournful tone. Walter subtly interchanges free verse elements with formal structures such as stanzas that echo each other and a quiet rhyme and rhythm, slipping into the concern with poetry-making within the poems: In ‘Marching’ the speaker smiles fondly at children’s choices between the simple rhythm of a school drill and “our fine irony” in poetry. Music and writing poetry are the subject of other poems too; I am particularly fond of ‘Paganini in Helenvale’, a poem in couplets where the rough world of the young people waits on rain and words “hanging in the air / like a fresh sadness” to settle
dripping as the violin bows,
 
along the gangster pavements
each child here knows.
The poet also thinks about other forms of representing the world and one’s perceptions – ‘Enfolding’ is a longer poem full of the colours of painting. The everyday world of the speaker concerns children trying to find their way in the “gun streets, up and down streets / the old-young men listless streets”, reflections on the past “leaving long shadows”, visiting his mother, feeling wordless with a stranger singing his loss at a bar. “I have no easy words”, the poet says, but shapes his to encounters with others in a dry and gangster world, to bring them “in the sight / of the poetry eye”.
 
Olwethu Mxoli brings a fresh and direct voice to the page. Her poems speak with immediacy about difficult dimensions of experience. Among these are grief, described as a limb that “just hangs there” and depression. The latter is particularly vivid in the poems ‘Today’ and ‘Being okay’, setting up a self-judgment against an expectation of how one should be. In ‘Being okay’ she uses the line spacing effectively to mimic what is contained emotionally against slipping into spillage when she describes preparing to face the world in dressing with
… a scrupulous headwrap
tied tightly and high to keep all the darkness
from
spilling
out of my
               head
and tainting the sky.
Violence against women is addressed in, among others, ‘Exhibit A’, a poem that presents a trial as an orgy, thereby demonstrating the position of the victim as display case, and ‘Live feed’ that forwards the presence of social media. There is a rage and helplessness in writing about being young and black, an awareness of the precariousness of identity in a world where education goes with a different kind of cultural immersion. In ‘Mother tongue’ she writes about no longer being fluent enough in isiXhosa to relate comfortably with her parents, repeating the unease stanza by stanza, until “I don’t say much anymore”. The poem ‘Blackness’ presents itself as an answer to “You ask me what blackness means”. It is not a comfortable poem, partly because the speaker turns it to interrogate her own position:
At night, in the quiet comfort of suburbia
in my perfect accent
I wonder how black I am
without suffering.
Blackness is also guilt.
It is also apologizing
for not starving.
It is a hard thing to hear, to listen into pain so bound into time and others and self and us as South Africans.
 
Ed Burle’s contributions are mostly bite-sized observations. There are a few poems where he works his precise observations into a narrative, such as ‘Tren a Barcelona’ about two passengers falling asleep together on a train and ‘Held’, where a moment is stretched into a memory from repeating the opening line “A man leaning in a doorway” stanza by stanza. The short poems sometimes take as subject memory or observations of nature. In my opinion, some of them are so short as to present an image unconnected, almost like seeing a photo from a stranger’s album without context, some even appear to be grammatically incomplete. To me it feels as if they could be starting points to something else, perhaps counter-intuitively given their brevity, to story. ‘Excerpts from a writer’s museum’ seems to bring together some of the concern with memory, the given, and gestures to reach out into an eerie narrative – almost a ghost story. The short poems, close to haikus, work best when they become aphorisms in their succinct wisdom, for example:
Smiling cashier –
no trace of the visions
that bleed through her dreams.
 
The everyday presented in Silke Heiss’ poems spring from meetings with family, friends, chance encounters, for example a conversation with a cashier at Pick n Pay, and where she finds herself. Her world is filled with people and creatures, all presented as selves – blue cranes “disappeared / their blue selves into the sky”; recovering her health, her mother finds new dignity in the mirror – “the image now / of her lovely old / self” and, finding herself in a home with a boomslang, the poet considers “a space replete with hideouts / for sleek selves”. To me ‘Lessons in hand’ represents the lively interest in the natural world and spontaneous creation of meaning from everyday occurrences prevalent in her poems. Moving around carefully, minding the snake at home, the poet finds the boomslang on a shutter, from where “he turns, leaps / like a graph of himself”. This turning the snake into an image of something drawn, written, continues in her reflections:
Let me read this event
as if I were blind.
Let me like him be feeling
my entire length
a sole – the body one extended foot,
feeding on the Braille
of surfaces.
Heiss, too, recently published a book – Greater Matter, reading meaning and her experiences in the wake of the illness and death of her husband, the poet Norman Morrissey.
 
Lara Kirsten’s poetry has grown in depth since my previous encounters with her work. She mainly writes in Afrikaans, but there are two English poems among her contributions in Staying Hungry. Of these, ‘stridulate’ offers the English reader a taste of her offerings in Afrikaans, as it also plays a great deal with the visceral experience of sound in writing and performing poetry. The poem introduces a newly learnt word – relating to insects producing sounds by rubbing their wings together –  and with this the poet flies “with its sizzling syllables / right into/ the dusky corner of this poem”. She then expands it into an extended image for the writing of poetry, including onomatopoeia:
woooshhhhhhhh
with resonant surety
the verses begin to rub against each other
and a soft vibration begins to spark the silence
Her poems in this anthology are preoccupied with the need and techniques of writing poetry. She seems to take joy in in-line rhymes and alliterative lines of stacked words rushing forward with an energetic sense of ‘do this!’ Describing her mouth as her tools, her place of industry to make poems, she states her joy as unmatched:
geen groter digtersjolyt!
met net hierdie enkele mond
maak ek my wêreld rond en bont
However, poems like ‘oëverblindery’ and ‘trekkrag’ also question the sources and techniques of poetry – as tricks, on the one hand, and struggle, on the other. Art, Kirsten reflects, does not come from harmony, as people seem to think, but from resistance. Creativity, she insists “moet trekkrag hê / vassuigend, vasstekend / vas geanker in `n hittige halsstarrigheid.”
 
Jacques Coetzee uses his poetry to reflect on his life, make “accessible at a moment’s notice” memories and moments of selfhood. The poems ask questions about the emotional and personal legacy we inherit from our parents. There are several poems on the deathbed of his father and one can hear the father in the poet’s recall: “One of the last things you said was: ‘Give that boy a chair, he’s in his own way.’” The poet probes his own sense of being in the world in relation to his father:
I can never be quite sure
if it’s me who says yes or no,
who keeps faith or breaks it,
trying always to learn
what it means to call you father in this world,
to call myself your son.
Coetzee’s poems are all in a direct first-person speaker, telling and thinking about incidents in his life – hospital visits, attending a class, listening to the experience of a student, remembering going down a water-slide as a child, facing his graceless response to the man who let him go for free, commemorating love and friendship. The poet often conflates writing poetry and music or song to reach for an inner truth and harmony through art. For example, he holds on to lines from Ingeborg Bachman “as if / they can coax / my timid, over-educated words / into wildness; can hinge me into song” and ends his tribute to a friend with this echo – “because of the songs / that still have to be sung”. The poem ‘Narrow songs’ uses the image of singing to speak about the value of what making art is about (perhaps one can call it getting out of one’s own way):
I bring you these long, narrow songs –
a ladder going inwards and down
…
the steep, narrow ladder of words and music
leading down
into the loneliness and courage
of the body each day.
 
John van Wyngaard provides a dash of satire, making fun of his ailments in ‘Geriatric rap’ and putting several twists in the oh-so-sincere sphere of poetry events in ‘At the poetry reading group’. The poem ‘Addo’ starts out with a comment on game farm fences – “tall posts, steel cables, electrified / - built to keep the orchards out”, but takes the subject of elephants with a gracious beauty: “They’re a dark shadow breathing together / in all the hard light of this moment” and a respectful acknowledgement of their otherness in the world:
No. Put down your bag
of words and images, and witness this.
They simply are, here.
Elephants, leaning together.
Living the absolute of their own company.
Look.
Other poems on making are ‘On writing a poem’ and ‘Making dress’, seeing the person making it “full of imagining / how this flattened nothing will come to fill out” – visualizing the act of creation. There is a sense of connection with people in Van Wyngaard’s work – the amused presentation of the speaker’s endeavors, the tender ‘To Caro, far away’ on missing his absent beloved in the small details of a day, such as sharing fruit for their muesli and ‘Skin’, dedicated to Norman [Morrissey] on the vulnerability of being alive.
 
Something of that sense of community between the poets in Staying Hungry is also conveyed in that Heiss gives a poem – ‘Did not blot’ – on the death of Cathal Lagan’s son. “I could hurt // with you, and jot this / down”. Lagan’s poem on this death, ‘You died’, speaks about the presence of the experience of absence:
You died
but the clock still ticks,
mail for you is still delivered
and we half expect
you’re still around
the next corner.
Ending the line on “still around” allows one to read the absence in this renewed sense of loss, as if there was some hide-and-seek going on. Lagan’s other poem ‘Quae est ista?’ uses a liturgical text on Mary to meditate on mystery, on what remains hidden, sealed. Perhaps much of making, poetry, dresses, art and observation is to reach past what remains hidden, sealed and perhaps it is a particular quiet that can also hold what remains sealed before one.
 
Staying Hungry provides quite a range of poems. Each poet is in effect given about 15 pages of contributions. It occurred to me that this is almost a chapbook of poems per poet published annually and I wondered about the different kinds of affirmation or readings that arise from this mode of publication. Choosing to share work in an anthology requires more cooperation in the production side of it and perhaps remains a supportive platform for the poets who then write and publish as a community. Some of this is suggested by Van Wyngaard’s poem on the mystery (the waiting and wrestling) of engaging with a poem,  serving as a conclusion:
Neither of you can know what you want to say,
Or be, or become, or whether you ever will,
Until it says itself, so some dialogue can play
And conversation begins, and goes on…
 
Reviewer: Marike Beyers
Curator: Amazwi South African Museum of Literature
The opinions expressed in this review are the reviewer’s and should not be taken to represent Amazwi.
​

This Moment's Marrow (Ecca Poets 2017). A Reader's Impression
​Review by Rene Bohnen
(Extracts on Norman Morrissey and Silke Heiss)

What is marrow? This question spontaneously pops up as I hold the 2017 publication of the Ecca Poets – their 20th book in 25 years. This edition, This Moment’s Marrow, offers the reader  an eclectic group of poets in an anthology which makes for an enriching read.
 
So what is marrow? Dictionaries present definitions we know so well that we probably seldom pause to think about the profound meaning of the word. Marrow is “a soft fatty substance in the cavities of bones” the internet offers, and also “ the essential part of something”.  Synonyms given are: “essence, core, pith” and “heart”.
 
In the reading of This Moment’s Marrow,  I discover and experience the whole spectrum of these dictionary entries.
 
The anthology title is taken from a Norman Morrissey poem on page 26.
​
Grasp
 
A dove called,
and I’d a vision
of our lithe boomslang
 
up in the cherry tree:
the Holy Ghost
and the hero
 
winding Hippocrates’ staff of healing
in one grasp
of thought:
 
old myths, symbols
lurking
in this moment’s marrow.
 
All of the Morrissey poems in this anthology show an accomplished poet at his task. Strong pastoral imagery, bursting with life, alternates with delicate vignettes of tenderness and tranquil silence.
 
Norman Morrissey passed away in July 2017 and has left a rich literary legacy. Like the butterfly shows us the breeze, this poet shows us wisdom. (Page 24)
 
            Breeze
 
You knew there was a breeze
only
because the butterflies
 
danced
in
it! 
 
According to the Preface, the poets have had “no real aspirations or manifestos” and their books will hopefully always have “a workshop feel” (Brian Walter on page 1)
 
If the function of marrow is to generate blood cells, the vital role of Ecca get-togethers is evident. Nurturing and giving oxygen, the group promotes growth in individual poets. All have successfully made their own paths as well – since paths are made by walking, as the Spanish poet Antonio Machado so succinctly put it.
 
[...]
 
Children and babies feed the marrow of a mother’s soul, as they do that of the poet. 
 
            When I fell
            pregnant
            with you I fell
 
            into new makings,
            poems would wake me”
 
writes Silke Heiss in “Kept up” on page 27.  She is a poet who understands the exquisite tension that is created by holding two polarities at once. I give you the example on page 29, where a surprising contradiction alerts the reader to a vast truth held within a small poem:
 
            Mist    
 
Mist is
a revelation,
a happy Gossip –
 
tells all
where air has been –
is going to.
 
Almost haiku-like, the short poems sigh with insight and meaning; they show Heiss to be a master of cutting right to the essence of her observation. In her longer poems, she displays an instinctive grasp of the objective correlative, by evoking strong emotion in the reader without annoying prescription. On page 29 we find the
 
            Wood Owl
 
            I go outside to fetch some kindling,
            my blankets snag on branches dry –
            unwitting I catch them with the twigs I’m breaking:
            they whirr and cough and patter and sigh.
 
            Panic I subdue with patience,
            pull away gently, sensing why.
            Free at last I fill the box,
            but am lost in the dark by the Wood owl’s cry.

- Rene Bohnen, January 2019
The entire review will shortly be available on eccapoets.blogspot.com/p/reviews-and-commentary.html​

7 books of love poems by Norman Morrissey and Silke Heiss
​Review by Cathy Dippnall 

​Review of seven books of love poems: Tryst, Learn the Dance, Simply in Love; To the Far Horizon; Love Letters to the Earth; A Shell Held to the Ear and the final book, The Only Altar, published after Norman’s untimely death.
 
To say I was moved is an understatement. I attended Silke’s readings of the last book, The Only Altar with some trepidation after receiving the books to review and an invitation to a reading in Simon’s Town earlier this year. How was I going to cope, listening to poems from a beautiful woman poet whose beloved soul mate and husband has died?
 
Silke held herself perfectly, read with passion, simplicity and love. It was I who received the jolt. These poems could have been about my life, my soulmate, right down to the ill health, watching your loved one struggling and in pain, joy in the mundane, gratefulness.
 
These were my immediate thoughts after the reading of The Only Altar, which I penned in a notebook, ‘Your poems (Silke and Norman) opened up my innermost parts where deep down the language of love, life and death mingle and intertwine. Here, a key has been turned, there is a light leading the way out.’
 
After reading the first five books again I can finally put pen to paper, not because I dislike them, quite the opposite; the poetry reaches my inner core and I’ve had to reach right in and acknowledge so much that is similar.
 
The poetry in these books are of two adults, broken, hurt individuals who discover raw, all-empowering love with a soul mate. who could have been a long-lost lover in a former life. They are besotted, like young lovers exploring their bodies and powerful sexual urges. The beauty of mature love is that these lovers find perfection in each other where others would see age, wrinkles and gnarled hands.
 
Once the first stage of love and romance is over it chrysalises into a new love, of respect, tolerance and trust. Self-doubts are assuaged in their desires that bind them together and in Silke’s words in Late Harvest “… in our ripeness we are each other’s final dawning – a late harvest’s sweetness has more rising suns than any other.”
 
The poets and lovers find beauty in each other and all around them amidst the feelings of angst at Norman’s failing health. Each is absorbed by the other, to the end Norman sees Silke’s beautiful frail body (that has grown smaller as his health dwindles) as delicate and bud-like.
 
Time is of the essence, Silke and Norman make the most of each day, sitting and writing to each other or sms’ing when they are not together. The love tryst carries on far beyond the reach of a mortal body. The soul is ever present, talking in the wind, the sky, the earth, the butterfly landing on a rose.
 
True love never ends.

– Cathy Dippnall, writer and editor, 12th November 2018