Hidden River

Stephanie Norgate’s compelling poems celebrate our sensuous contact with each other and with nature. With subjects ranging from a child’s first enjoyment of speech to a lover’s lost dialect, they make invisible experiences tangible through vivid and intense imagery. Lovers in a mud bath are transformed into a new vision of creation. The private rituals of birth, love and loss imprint themselves on the landscape, with ‘a strong magical sense of rawness and eroticism’ (Gerry Stewart), in poems ‘all about skin – that thin, protective coating, the point of contact between inner and outer worlds’ (Jenny Swann). Hidden River is Stephanie Norgate’s first book-length collection, and follows a prize-winning pamphlet, Fireclay, praised by John Walsh in the Independent as the work of ‘a marvellous new poet’. Her poems share a passionate concern for survival, for the authentic life of the body, and for all the elements but especially water – its touch and surface, its buoyancy and nourishment, the flowing rhythms that enter us. They ‘begin to explore nothing less than human invention’ (Jo Shapcott) as they chart strong currents between the dispossessed and the natural world. Hidden River was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and for the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize.