In The Blue Den, people travel along the edges of roads, landscapes and emotions. The poems give voice to a stream under ice, a flooded road, and an ant beneath the sky. Strongly visual and imaginative, these poems explore the edges of memory, the mutual dependency of man and nature. Stephanie Norgate's second collection celebrates the power of intense looking and making, whether meditating on refugees in an oarless boat or Giacometti working restlessly at the figure of a strange walker. These poems inhabit marginal, unsung and free experiences: plastic bags along a road or the return of children over a lake. The underside resonates with strange vivid beauty. The Blue Den is a book of lyrical, sensuous poems which builds on the achievement of Stephanie Norgate's debut collection Hidden River, which was shortlisted for both the Forward First Collection Prize and the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. '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.
