The Conversation

Stephanie Norgate

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781780375748
• eBook ISBN: 9781780375755
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

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).

Table of contents

• Description
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• The House
• Eavesdroppers
• Word Hoards
• Miracle
• February Foxes
• Sycamore
• Dead Nettle in the Fann Street Wildlife Garden
• Wildlife Garden in the City
• outside some flats in Camberwell
• Orthopaedics and Trauma, King’s College Hospital
• Bedroom Tax
• Evening Teaching
• ask the heathland
• walk in a wood after a long loneliness
• The Machine
• Night Walk with My Parents
• To Wish on the Stone
• The Bridge
• lines prompted by an old leather travel bag
• In Trieste
• Jane Austen’s Visitor
• Studio mirror: the maid speaks
• Dalí among the cactuses
• Time slip
• Sweet Woodruff
• Comfort
• The Night Table
• Terrace Ghosts
• on seeing a drift of blackthorn in April’s haze
• Question
• At the Stone Chamber of an Ancient Village
• lockdown bluebells
• above ourselves
• To sing of soap in desperate times
• An Hour’s Walk
• The Sears and Roebuck Sheet as Scrubs Bag
• Through a glass darkly
• Elegy for the Closeness of London
• After an evening’s writing in the shed
• The Summoner of Birds
• The Wake
• Your Poem
• At St Erth
• Walking the Path Again
• The Conversation
• Siskin
• Daedalus over the Downs
• Gate on the Downs
• What the chair saw
• The Clumsinesses
• The Tile
• Landings
• About the Author
• Copyright