Nicholson, Norman

(1914-1987)

   Born in Millom, Cumbria, on the edge of the Lake District, he lived most of his life in the same house, apart from a long spell in his teens in a sanatorium with tuberculosis. Millom was one of the busiest iron ore mining areas in Europe during the late 1800s, and the whole of South and West Cumbria was peppered with quarries, mines and furnaces for smelting the iron ore. All of this is reflected in Nicholson's poetry, as well as religion and faith. He was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1977 and the Order of the British Empire in 1981. A memorial, in the form of a specially commissioned stained glass window, was placed in St. Georges Church in Millom. Some of his publications: Five Rivers, 1944. Rock Face, 1948. The Pot Geranium, 1954. A Local Habitation, 1972. Sea to the West, 1981. Some of his poems: "Black Combe White," "Cleator Moor," "For the Bicentenary of Isaac Watts," "Halley's Comet," "Ravenglass Railway Station, Cumberland," "The Blackberry," "The Burning Bush," "The Tune the Old Cow Died Of."

   Sources: Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language. Francis Turner Palgrave, ed. Oxford University Press (1964, Sixth edition, updated by John Press, 1994. Modern British Poetry. 7th rev. ed. Louis Untermeyer, ed. Harcourt, Brace, 1962. Open DirectoryArts: Literature: World Literature: British (http://dmoz.org/Arts/Literature/World_Literature/British/20th_C entury/). The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Earth is the Lord's: Poems of the Spirit. Helen Plotz, ed. Thomas Y. Crowell, 1965. The New Yorker Book of Poems. The New Yorker editors. Viking Press, 1969. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 4th ed. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stal, eds. W.W. Norton, 1996. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia).