Stephanie Norgate

Miracle


In supermarkets, strapped
in a trolley,

on the motorway,
belted in the back of a car,

under the foundered houses,
open mouthed and fed by drips,

in a box drilled with holes
in the hold of a boat,

in fish crates and on cardboard,
on pallets and straw,

on a bed of needles
on the forest floor,

in the curve of a rosy scarf
tied to a woman’s back,

in a line of walkers
along railway tracks,

under a tarpaulin
on mud and sand,

a child is sleeping,
a child is sleeping.


*


The Conversation
(i.m. H.D.)


Now our words need a new measure of time,
syllables for seconds, sonnets for minutes,
epics for hours – this is our café society,
as if the café will never close and the steps
from the café will never tip us out
on to Trafalgar Square, to hurry across the wet stones,
with the gold of our talk glinting round our feet,
the largesse of winter scattering our reflections
into the tears of the fountain’s mist, which falls
and rises to the lit-up windows, gathering
in the bare-armed trees. There we are, leaving
the coffee spoons and teaspoons on saucers,
hurrying away to our separate evenings,
walking out among the languages of the world
which find no true word for the talk of women,
unless, dear friend, I name our talk for you,
a light that shimmers along city streets
and out along the lanes of great souled hills.


*


The Summoner of Birds
(i.m. H.D.)


A rounded woman, her hair up
in a sea-coloured net, wearing a blue dress,
a white apron, carrying a bowl on her hip,
walks out of now, walks out of time,
walks out onto the pebbles, steps
over the winch’s chain to the wash
of small waves to summon a gyre
of gulls and their cries.
                                   She pauses
where the stream pours into the sea,
lifts the bowl from her hip
and, in one curved move, flings
knuckle bones, neck joints, spareribs,
arrows of seabass, sole and cod
into the air to drop in a moment’s fall
till snatched by the beaks of the gulls
and carried up again, while sand pipers
pick the beach clean, and the winch
weighs down the scene.

Then, comes a winged giant along the Todden
threatening death, but underneath
an actor works his wings.
                                       Mostly, what I miss
in these soon after days, is our talk,
what I would have said, what you
would have made of this. The shadows
of things, of gulls, of paper wings, of bones
play out on the harbour’s shore,
with one witness less. And now,
the woman in the blue dress
picks up the empty bowl and returns
to the inn. The giant folds his wings.
Even with you gone, I shape this story,
and ask, what do you make of this?
 

    11     The House
    12     Eavesdroppers
    13     Word Hoards
    14     Miracle
    15     February Foxes
    16     Sycamore
    17     Dead Nettle in the Fann Street Wildlife Garden
    18     Wildlife Garden in the City
    29     outside some flats in Camberwell
    21     Orthopaedics and Trauma, King’s College Hospital
    23     Bedroom Tax
    25     Evening Teaching
    26     ask the heathland
    27     walk in a wood after a long loneliness
    28     The Machine
    30     Night Walk with My Parents
    31     To Wish on the Stone
    32     The Bridge
    34     lines prompted by an old leather travel bag
    36     In Trieste
    37    Jane Austen’s Visitor
    38     Studio mirror: the maid speaks
    39     Dalí among the cactuses
    40     Time Slip
    41     Sweet Woodruff
    42     Comfort
    43     The Night Table
    44     Terrace Ghosts
    45     on seeing a drift of blackthorn in April’s haze
    46     Question
    47     At the Stone Chamber of an Ancient Village
    49     lockdown bluebells
    50     above ourselves
    51     To sing of soap in desperate times
    53     An Hour’s Walk
    55     The Sears and Roebuck sheet as Scrubs Bag
    57     Through a glass darkly
    58     Elegy for the Closeness of London
    62     After an evening’s writing in the shed
    63     The Summoner of Birds
    64     The Wake
    65     Your Poem
    66     At St Erth
    67     Walking the Path Again
    69     The Conversation
    70     Siskin
    72     Daedalus over the Downs
    74     Gate on the Downs
    76     What the chair saw
    77     The Clumsinesses
    78     The Tile
    79     Landings

 

'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

‘Norgate shuns full-blown epiphany in favour of a quiet, patient unveiling of the world that invites a way of seeing, a way of thinking. These poems with their observational insistence, are charged with a phenomenological inquiry.’ – Julian Stannard, Poetry Review

‘This is a collection packed with rewarding poetry to be read and re-read with new gems to uncover each time.’ – Wendy Klein, Artemis

‘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’ – Ben Wilkinson, TLS

‘Norgate always observes closely and uses form as both a prompt and a welcome dissonance.’ – Vidyan Ravinthiran, Poetry London