Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Hidden River, Stephanie Norgate, 2008, Bloodaxe Books.  £8.95 ISBN  978-1-8522479-6-6

 
Here is a poet who travels widely and takes you with her everywhere she goes.  Her poems make comparisons: place and function (“and someone was growing roses / feeding them with blood and bone, … how the mind refuses to settle on bags of bodies / grown row after row they don’t unwrap them”, Photos of Kosovo) and time (“…The children, up late, laughing … knew nothing of big stale larders, … butter on a cool cleft shelf”, Tupperware).

The realities of life, whether under different regimes (“You’re photographing eyes too stunned to weep.”, sonnet crown, Send and Receive) or during separation from a loved one:

                  I call you from Heddon’s Mouth,
                  …
                  I wish the phone would carry the scent of gorse 
                  …
                  but best of all, as the signal wavers, then holds,
                  your voice, hoarse, and shouting I’m still here.

                      Calling from the Hidden River

are addressed squarely.  Several of the poems spend time with the dead or absent in finely drawn vignettes, as in the thoughtful and tender poem, Early Morning:

          Now we’re both standing at the farm’s gateway,
          drenched in low cloud, dampened by grass.

We’re craning our heads to see into the future.
I know that you’ll live. You know nothing of me.

The range of topics covered in the collection is impressive: personal, primal, political, literary reference, imaginative or dreamlike, translation; and Norgate’s technical skills, her control of pace for example (“Propitiation – it tries that old word / on its rushing tongues, but tributaries / garble the sound to a susurration”, Ponte Sant’Angelo, Rome) and atmosphere and texture (descriptions of a painting and of woods in ‘A perfect example of a paralysed larynx’) are masterly.

Particularly interesting is the translation of a poem in hexameter, to a poem that, despite its distance from the haiku concept, owes its smoothness and much of its authority to the haiku structure (Haiku from Lucretius). My congratulations, too, on inclusion of just the right Notes for the two poems where I had noted to look things up…). 

These are serious and seriously good poems; poems that don’t short-cut themselves into obscure concepts, where each poem you read makes you ready and wanting the next, already knowing you’ll return to every one of them.