Review of "A Life Between the Brackets" by Chad Norman

Review of "A Life Between the Brackets" by Chad Norman

Chad Norman's latest collection, 'A Life Between the Brackets', is a meditation on observation, loss, and humanity's fractured relationship with the natural world. Organised into eight thematic sections; Wisdom, Humans Otherwise, Ukraine, Observe the Observer, For Others, Industrial Ave., Religiously Brief, and Truro Town, the book moves between intimate domestic moments and urgent social commentary, all filtered through the lens of a speaker deeply attuned to the voices of birds, trees, and the overlooked.

What makes this collection remarkable is its consistent refusal to separate the personal from the political, or the human from the natural. Norman's poems often begin in observation, a starling at the feeder, a hawk hunting in snow, crows gathering for scraps, but they consistently expand outward to encompass larger questions about care, responsibility, and complicity.

In "The Clapping Man's Claim," the speaker catalogs the trust he has gained from various birds and animals, only to conclude with a subtle irony: he has gained the trust of his wife too, yet the accumulation of these moments underscores not connection but isolation. The natural world becomes not an escape from human problems but a mirror of them.
The Ukraine section stands as the collection's political heart. Poems like "The Rape of Ukraine," "How to Know I Am a Human," and "Sailing to the Kremlin" (a meditation on Alexei Navalny) confront the helplessness of witnessing distant atrocities. Norman does not offer solutions or grand pronouncements; instead, he registers the inadequacy of gesture. A speaker feeds doves while war happens elsewhere. A blue jay eating snow becomes a metaphor for continuing life in the face of horror. This restraint is the poetry's strength. It trusts the reader to feel the weight of what is not said.

The "Industrial Ave." and "Truro Town" sections turn toward environmental destruction and personal loss, introducing a more bitter register. "A Prestigious Headache, and the Six-Question Cure" is an extended indictment of habitat destruction carried out by an ecologist and her contractors, framed through mounting rhetorical questions that never arrive at resolution. The speaker's anger here is palpable, yet even in fury, Norman maintains his characteristic attentiveness to small details...pine cones, bird calls, the memory of what was alive before the machines came.

Throughout, Norman's formal approach is deceptively simple. His lines often break conversationally, and he favours clarity over obscurity. Yet this plainspoken quality masks considerable craft. Repetition becomes incantatory. Catalogues of natural observation accumulate into emotional weight. Dedication and memorial poems honour specific individuals, both the murdered taxi driver Prabhjot Singh Katri and the deceased cat Simona, with a tenderness that resists sentimentality through precise, ungoverned detail.
If there is a limitation, it may be that the breadth of the collection sometimes pulls against depth. Shifting between intimate observation, political outrage, personal elegy, and ecological complaint, individual poems can feel slight when read in sequence. Yet this very restlessness, this refusal to settle into a single voice or concern, might well be precisely the point. The speaker of 'A Life Between the Brackets' is someone trying to hold multiple griefs, observations, and moral positions simultaneously, and the book's formal and tonal variety mirrors that struggle.

What endures in these poems is their fundamental generosity. Norman writes as someone who has learned to pay attention to birds, to strangers, to loss, to beauty persisting amid ruin. In an era of distraction and indifference, that attention itself feels like an act of resistance.

'A Life Between the Brackets' is a book for readers who believe that how we observe the world matters, and that poetry remains one of our best tools for bearing witness.
-Harry Hickey, June 2026.

Published by ShadowScript Publications and available on Amazon and from selected bookstores in Ireland and Canada.