Ask Ken Brewer, poet laureate of Utah, to comment on Norris' standing in the literary community and he chuckles and stammers, as if this is the dumbest question he ever heard because, well, doesn't everyone know?

"He's got to have the biggest literary reputation in the state," he begins. "He's an internationally known writer. He's certainly the major star in the state."

Norris officially retired from BYU a couple of years ago after heart surgery but only formally. BYU named him its poet in residence, essentially subsidizing his poetry while also utilizing him as a roving ambassador and tutor of poetry and literature. Who better for the job than the warm, humorous, mild-tempered man whose work is immediately accessible in a way many poets are not?

Author James Dickey once wrote that poets would kill for Norris' authenticity of voice. Jerry Johnston, a Deseret Morning News editorial writer and columnist and a personal friend of Norris, explains it this way: "He has one of the clearest voices, his own way of saying things. It's not a derivative of other poets or tradition. It's not putting on a front. He speaks as who he is. You recognize it as him. And he writes in a very authentic, measured, precise way that is very alive."

Brewer says simply, "Leslie is an absolutely immaculate writer. The craft is superb but hidden. It's like the substructure of a house. You see the exterior, but you don't see how well it's built. It's not intrusive."

The words and the music of his words came from his father George. He grew up a sensitive, observant, aware boy in a hardscrabble steel and coal town, Merthyr Tydfil, which was one valley over from the town that was the setting for the book, "How Green Was My Valley."

His father George was a tall, athletic man who missed his chance for education and professional training while fighting World War I. He worked as an engineer in the mines until a falling rock broke his back. "We would stick pins in his back and he would never feel them," recalls Norris.

George was only 27 and the Depression was on. He took a job delivering milk seven days a week, 365 days a year, with no holidays. They were poor, but they were one of only a handful of families in the town who had employment.

George was innately intelligent in prep school — he won many of the academic prizes — and a voracious reader. Each night he would come home and immerse himself in a book. He committed hundreds of poems and parodies to memory, which he liked to recite while carrying Leslie on his tall shoulders "up in the clouds." As his father's official librarian, responsible for returning and checking out his father's books, Leslie became acquainted with literature and began reading at an early age.