Norman Nicholson - Work

Work

The work of Norman Nicholson is characterised by the simplicity and directness of his language. He attempted to write in the vernacular of the common people in his native town. Much of his work concerned mining, quarrying and ironworks — the dominant industries in his area. Religion and faith were another aspect of his work. His poetry also abounds with direct quotations from everyday life, skilfully woven into the body of the poem. The opening of "Old Man at a Cricket Match" is typical:

'It's mending worse,' he said,
Bending west his head...

One important feature of Nicholson's work is a conscious adoption of provincialism coupled with a conscious rejection of the value judgements associated with it: "the smug, the narrow, the short-sighted... a bad copy of the life of the capital," as he called them. To him a provincial was one who lives in the place his parents, friends and relations live, where there is a shared culture, not "an enormous heterogeneous collection of people gathered from all corners of the country and deposited like silt at the delta of a great river." It is in a contained provincial community, "in our intense concern with what is close to us, that we most resemble the people of other countries and other times" and gain awareness of "that which is enduring in life and society."

Another important feature is Nicholson's Christianity. The religious poems in Five Rivers foreshadow verse plays of his – The Old Man of the Mountains (1946), A Match for the Devil (1955) and Birth by Drowning (1960) – placing the Bible in a distinctly Cumbrian setting. A fourth, Prophesy to the Wind (1947) is about survival after nuclear disaster.

As a poet Nicholson is not generally associated with any of the movements of the 20th century. Rather, like Charles Causley, he seems to be considered more of an isolated figure, working on his poetry outside of the mainstream of poetic trends. Nonetheless, he acknowledged a debt to W. H. Auden and the way he had "turned to the industrial scene." His descriptive poetry can be remarkably vivid:

Above the collar of crags,
The granite pate breaks bare to the sky
Through a tonsure of bracken and bilberry.
(From "Eskdale Granite")

Nicholson's Lake District is not the Lake District of the Tourist Board, not Hawkshead and Windermere, but the industrial coastal towns of Millom, Egremont, Whitehaven, Bootle and Askam. His admirers included T. S. Eliot and Ted Hughes, and Seamus Heaney, who wrote in a poem of tribute:

...those Cumbrian phonetics
cracked like a plaited whip
until the slack, nostalgic
ambler in me trotted

on the paved margin
of my own black pool —
Dublin black pool, dubh linn
...that is yours and mine as well

Other aspects of Nicholson include his social awareness as a champion of the working class. (He worked as a lecturer for the Workers' Educational Association.) His poem "Windscale" about a 1957 nuclear accident has become something of an environmentalists' anthem.

Nicholson was the subject of a South Bank Show broadcast in the United Kingdom on 4 November 1984.