When I sit down to talk to Henry Normal over Zoom, he’s wearing a sling, having broken his arm three weeks prior. But despite the injury, he’s still excited to talk about poetry. In fact, he’s been spending his recovery time reading other people’s favourite poems, after sending a call out on Facebook to fellow poetry lovers near and far. And as for his own collection, his appetite seems equally healthy, as he tells me that there will be “at least three volumes of Collected Poems, hopefully four”. Each of these contains three of his slimmer poetry anthologies, in the case of Volume Two: This Phantom Breath, The Department of Lost Wishes and Swallowing the Entire Ocean.
A lover of poetry since a young age, Henry remembers publishing his first collection when he was only nineteen, sold at Nottingham’s Mushroom Bookshop in the 1970s and entitled Is Love Science Fiction? A product of his time at “the writers group in the Central Library on Angel Row”, it’s something he looks back on fondly. And in the present day, after what he describes as a twenty-year break, his passion for the form is back in full force – with the wordsmith penning nine books in five years, re-starting with Staring Directly Into the Eclipse, published in 2016.
Do you think there’s any particular theme to your poetry? I ask Henry, wondering which are the topics that come up again and again. After thinking for a moment, he laughs, “It’s funny, because Amazon tells you which category your books are in, and I’ve been ranked 27th in the category of death and loss poetry, and also about the same in the category of inspirational poetry. So it’s varied, though to me they’re very similar in my outlook on life. Really, though, I suppose the collections are a diary of my internal landscape, and that’s something that can change from year-to-year. But they’re all about mapping out surroundings and coming to terms with life.”
