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.
*Helen Dunmore*
Hidden River attempts to explore the barely perceptible and the
fragile vicissitudes of human experience. In particular many of the
poems draw on the liminal relation between the natural world and
our own, combining craft and an unrehearsed sensibility to produce
inventive, and often energetic, results - various, resourceful and
often rewardingly delicate, Hidden River is an estimable debut.
*TLS*
An absolutely stunning first collection, combining craft and
passion. The poems encompass many subjects, from powerful and
moving poems about grief and loss, to sensual love poems, poems
about history and place, to poems that reach out into the worlds of
art, literature and politics. They are united by a sense of
something secret and undiscovered being revealed and by a very
distinctive, lyrical voice. The precariousness of human experience
is balanced by a precisely observed vision of the natural
world.
*Vicki Feaver*
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