The Conversation
In The Conversation, Stephanie Norgate explores relationships between nature and the city, the past and present, and character and writer. Shaped through both speech and storytelling, these visual, sensuous and imaginative poems celebrate friendship, even in grief, closeness in times of isolation and lockdown, and the longing to bridge gaps and find cures. Miracles are found in the everyday, in a child’s sleep or a lit-up house. Textiles transform into remembrancers, landscape into emotion. A contemporary Daedalus views his life from a hang-glider. A scrap of handwriting, cafe talk, an exploding car, an earthquake, the naming of fields or a line of walkers ignite conversations about place, time and the tender paradoxes of mortality. Stephanie Norgate’s first collection Hidden River (2008) was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was followed by The Blue Den (2012). The Conversation is her third collection. Her poetry has been praised for the ‘depth of its lyricism’ (Jackie Wills, Warwick Review), and for being ‘energetic and generous, and displaying a ‘feeling for place, for the roots of things’ and for being ‘searching, memorable and disconcerting … She has the ear for the music of a line and the shape and strength of an image.’ (R.V. Bailey, Artemis).
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The Conversation
In The Conversation, Stephanie Norgate explores relationships between nature and the city, the past and present, and character and writer. Shaped through both speech and storytelling, these visual, sensuous and imaginative poems celebrate friendship, even in grief, closeness in times of isolation and lockdown, and the longing to bridge gaps and find cures. Miracles are found in the everyday, in a child’s sleep or a lit-up house. Textiles transform into remembrancers, landscape into emotion. A contemporary Daedalus views his life from a hang-glider. A scrap of handwriting, cafe talk, an exploding car, an earthquake, the naming of fields or a line of walkers ignite conversations about place, time and the tender paradoxes of mortality. Stephanie Norgate’s first collection Hidden River (2008) was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was followed by The Blue Den (2012). The Conversation is her third collection. Her poetry has been praised for the ‘depth of its lyricism’ (Jackie Wills, Warwick Review), and for being ‘energetic and generous, and displaying a ‘feeling for place, for the roots of things’ and for being ‘searching, memorable and disconcerting … She has the ear for the music of a line and the shape and strength of an image.’ (R.V. Bailey, Artemis).
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The Conversation

The Conversation

by Stephanie Norgate
The Conversation
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The Conversation

The Conversation

by Stephanie Norgate

Overview

In The Conversation, Stephanie Norgate explores relationships between nature and the city, the past and present, and character and writer. Shaped through both speech and storytelling, these visual, sensuous and imaginative poems celebrate friendship, even in grief, closeness in times of isolation and lockdown, and the longing to bridge gaps and find cures. Miracles are found in the everyday, in a child’s sleep or a lit-up house. Textiles transform into remembrancers, landscape into emotion. A contemporary Daedalus views his life from a hang-glider. A scrap of handwriting, cafe talk, an exploding car, an earthquake, the naming of fields or a line of walkers ignite conversations about place, time and the tender paradoxes of mortality. Stephanie Norgate’s first collection Hidden River (2008) was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was followed by The Blue Den (2012). The Conversation is her third collection. Her poetry has been praised for the ‘depth of its lyricism’ (Jackie Wills, Warwick Review), and for being ‘energetic and generous, and displaying a ‘feeling for place, for the roots of things’ and for being ‘searching, memorable and disconcerting … She has the ear for the music of a line and the shape and strength of an image.’ (R.V. Bailey, Artemis).

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781780375755
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Publication date: 09/16/2021
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 77
File size: 362 KB

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).

Table of Contents

The House 11

Eavesdroppers 12

Word Hoards 13

Miracle 14

February Foxes 15

Sycamore 16

Dead Nettle in the Fann Street Wildlife Garden 17

Wildlife Garden in the City 18

Outside some flats in Camberwell 29

Orthopaedics and Trauma, King's College Hospital 21

Bedroom Tax 23

Evening Teaching 25

Ask the heathland 26

Walk in a wood after a long loneliness 27

The Machine 28

Night Walk with My Parents 30

To Wish on the Stone 31

The Bridge 32

Lines prompted by an old leather travel bag 34

In Trieste 36

Jane Austen's Visitor 37

Studio mirror: the maid speaks 38

Dali among the cactuses 39

Time Slip 40

Sweet Woodruff 41

Comfort 42

The Night Table 43

Terrace Ghosts 44

On seeing a drift of blackthorn in April's haze 45

Question 46

At the Stone Chamber of an Ancient Village 47

Lockdown bluebells 49

Above ourselves 50

To sing of soap in desperate times 51

An Hour's Walk 53

The Sears and Roebuck sheet as Scrubs Bag 55

Through a glass darkly 57

Elegy for the Closeness of London 58

After an evening's writing in the shed 62

The Summoner of Birds 63

The Wake 64

Your Poem 65

At St Erth 66

Walking the Path Again 67

The Conversation 69

Siskin 70

Daedalus over the Downs 72

Gate on the Downs 74

What the chair saw 76

The Clumsinesses 77

The Tile 78

Landings 79

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