Description
Stephanie Norgate's compelling poems celebrate our sensuous contact with each other and with nature. With subjects ranging from a child's first enjoyment of speech to a lover's lost dialect, they make invisible experiences tangible through vivid and intense imagery. Lovers in a mud bath are transformed into a new vision of creation. The private rituals of birth, love and loss imprint themselves on the landscape, with 'a strong magical sense of rawness and eroticism' (Gerry Stewart), in poems 'all about skin - that thin, protective coating, the point of contact between inner and outer worlds' (Jenny Swann). Hidden River is Stephanie Norgate's first book-length collection, and follows a prize-winning pamphlet, Fireclay, praised by John Walsh in the Independent as the work of 'a marvellous new poet'. Her poems share a passionate concern for survival, for the authentic life of the body, and for all the elements but especially water - its touch and surface, its buoyancy and nourishment, the flowing rhythms that enter us. They 'begin to explore nothing less than human invention' (Jo Shapcott) as they chart strong currents between the dispossessed and the natural world. Hidden River was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and for the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize.
About the Author
Stephanie Norgate is a poet and playwright. Her plays have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. For many years, she ran the MA in Creative Writing at Chichester University and is now a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Southampton. She edited an international collection of essays, Poetry and Voice (CSP, 2012) and Winchester Poetry Festival's Chalk Poets Anthology (Sarsen Press, 2015). In 2016, she completed a study of poetry trails for South Downs National Park. As a translator, she has contributed to Modern Poetry in Translation and the MPT anthology, Centres of Cataclysm (Bloodaxe Books/MPT, 2016). Her chapter about the imagery of the house in her poetry appears in Architectural Space and the Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Her three collections of poetry with Bloodaxe are Hidden River (2008), which was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, The Blue Den (2012) and The Conversation (2021).
Awards
Short-listed for Felix Dennis Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection 2008.
Book Information
ISBN 9781852247966
Author Stephanie Norgate
Format Paperback
Page Count 80
Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publisher Bloodaxe Books Ltd
About the Author
Stephanie Norgate is a poet and playwright. Her plays have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. For many years, she ran the MA in Creative Writing at Chichester University and is now a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Southampton. She edited an international collection of essays, Poetry and Voice (CSP, 2012) and Winchester Poetry Festival's Chalk Poets Anthology (Sarsen Press, 2015). In 2016, she completed a study of poetry trails for South Downs National Park. As a translator, she has contributed to Modern Poetry in Translation and the MPT anthology, Centres of Cataclysm (Bloodaxe Books/MPT, 2016). Her chapter about the imagery of the house in her poetry appears in Architectural Space and the Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Her three collections of poetry with Bloodaxe are Hidden River (2008), which was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, The Blue Den (2012) and The Conversation (2021).
Awards
Short-listed for Felix Dennis Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection 2008.
Book Information
ISBN 9781852247966
Author Stephanie Norgate
Format Paperback
Page Count 80
Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publisher Bloodaxe Books Ltd
