Conversation

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).

The poems in The Blue Den possess a brooding, magnetism which draws us into a drowned ship, a slow-worm’s narrow skull or the hand-clasp of an orang-utan. The beauty of imagery and rhythm is matched by the subtlety of the poet’s thought.

• 11 The House12 Eavesdroppers13 Word Hoards14 Miracle15 February Foxes16 Sycamore17 Dead Nettle in the Fann Street Wildlife Garden18 Wildlife Garden in the City29 outside some flats in Camberwell21 Orthopaedics and Trauma, King’s College Hospital23 Bedroom Tax25 Evening Teaching26 ask the heathland27 walk in a wood after a long loneliness28 The Machine30 Night Walk with My Parents31 To Wish on the Stone32 The Bridge34 lines prompted by an old leather travel bag36 In Trieste37 Jane Austen’s Visitor38 Studio mirror: the maid speaks39 Dalí among the cactuses40 Time Slip41 Sweet Woodruff42 Comfort43 The Night Table44 Terrace Ghosts45 on seeing a drift of blackthorn in April’s haze46 Question47 At the Stone Chamber of an Ancient Village49 lockdown bluebells50 above ourselves51 To sing of soap in desperate times53 An Hour’s Walk55 The Sears and Roebuck sheet as Scrubs Bag57 Through a glass darkly58 Elegy for the Closeness of London62 After an evening’s writing in the shed63 The Summoner of Birds64 The Wake65 Your Poem66 At St Erth67 Walking the Path Again69 The Conversation70 Siskin72 Daedalus over the Downs74 Gate on the Downs76 What the chair saw77 The Clumsinesses78 The Tile79 Landings