Publisher's Synopsis
In his latest collection of poems, Ken Norris poses the question: "Why does it take so long to understand / you're living in the masterpiece?" Often Autumnal in spirit and retrospective in their point of view, the poems in Living In The Masterpiece survey the territory and landscape of a life lived variously. Norris looks back over a lifetime that was almost evenly divided between the United States and Canada, offering us his different and incisive perspectives. Of the USA he writes "I just take a taxi / from pizza to pizza / in this land covered in cheese," while he describes Canada as "an open book / with unwritten pages," where "some sense resides. And limits / are placed on tragedy porn."
Equally at ease with the late visionary poetry of W.B. Yeats, the noir of Raymond Chandler, and the compelling blues of B.B. King as artistic influences, Norris takes the reader on an intriguing poetical tour of cultural, personal and spiritual life in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Living In The Masterpiece is an important meditation on mortality and the increasingly strange world that we inhabit.
