Norman Nicholson died in 1987. The five important books of verse he produced between the years 1944 (Five Rivers) and 1981 (Sea to the West) earned him the lasting admiration of readers well beyond the small patch of Cumbria which gave him all the subject matter he needed. In his introduction to the Collected Poems, Neil Curry - a friend of Nicholson and a poet himself - discusses the nature of Nicholson's parochialism and its paradoxical universality, demonstrating just what was meant when his Times obituarist called him the most gifted English Christian poet of the century. The full texts of the major collections - most long out of print - together with poems from The Candy-Floss Tree (1984) and other valuable items never printed in book form, substantiate that considerable claim.