A flame that burned to the end * – by Harry Owen
The sad truth is that, before I first came here ten
years ago, I knew almost nothing about South African poets. That changed very
quickly, however.
One of the first books I was given (in May 2007) was
called Dog Latin by someone I had
never heard of at the time but whom I would later come to know as both fellow poet
and friend – Norman Morrissey. A year later, in June 2008 at the launch of his
new collection, Triptych, at the old
Reddits Books & Coffee in New Street, he signed my book with the note:
“Harry, The first copy sold!” I had come a long way in twelve months.
So it was with a sense of profound sadness that I
learned of Norman’s death last week. He had retired owing to ill health in 2002
from his career as a lecturer in English at several South African universities,
including UCT and Fort Hare, in order to concentrate on his writing at his home
in Hogsback.
But before that he had to undergo lengthy treatment
for profound depression, a debilitating condition which he faced with candour
and courage. As he writes in ‘Preface to St Mark’s Diary’ about poems written
during this period: “I was working through a breakdown, doing cold turkey on
years of sleeping pills and painkillers, and at last getting full clinical diagnosis
on a condition that began with an infection trashing my nervous system in
November 1962, a month after my 13th birthday.”
Undoubtedly, Norman struggled – and so, inevitably,
did those with whom he shared his life; he could not then have been easy to
live with. Yet he wrote his way through it all, latterly with the love and
companionship of another poet – Silke Heiss, whom he married in 2013 and who
added immeasurably to the quality of his final years.
That same year I was privileged to include a wonderful
poem by Norman in the anthology For Rhino
in a Shrinking World. Called ‘Lord
of Life’, it tells the magical true story, from when he worked as a ranger for
the old Natal Parks Board, of Norman’s relationship with a bull rhino whose
“quiet gravity saved me, I’m sure/ many a vanity or vagueness of phrase”. I
heard Norman read this poem twice: once at Reddits Poetry here in Grahamstown
and once at the McGregor Poetry Festival in 2015.
So while I will certainly miss Norman Morrissey I
shall also continue to be inspired by his courage, his fortitude and his
unrelenting belief, enriched ultimately by the devotion of his wife Silke, in
the power of love to prevail over all hardship. This was his prayer, and I
think it was answered.
Prayer
The candle gutters down
till the wick floats in the last wax,
burns at both ends,
gives twice the light
because
of its nearing extinction:
let me
be
like that
the whole thread of my life
a flame
from childhood to old age
in one
clear, unwavering
consummation.
Norman Morrissey
(from Strandloop,
Echoing Green Press, 2016)
Norman's
Memorial Event in Hogsback will be held tomorrow, Saturday 5th August 2017, in
the Vula Vista Conference Centre at 3:30pm. The Memorial Event at Outeniqua Moon
near Mossel Bay will be held on Saturday 2nd September 2017 at 3:30pm.
*This article
appeared in Grahamstown's Grocotts Mail, 4 August 2017
