- The Guardian,
- Saturday May 17 2008
Hidden River, by Stephanie Norgate (Bloodaxe, £8.95)
Much of the writing in Hidden River is driven by a delight in the possibility of metaphor and, time and again, Norgate portrays herself urgently pursuing a series of images. Take the poem "Irrigator in the Far Field" - "my hand wants to write it. / It's like / a cossack's whirling legs, / gauzy nets hung out to dry, / a Roman fountain pumping / zigzags of spectra . . ." And the comparisons carry on chasing each other from line to line.
Hidden River is driven by a delight in the possibility of metaphor and, time and again, Norgate portrays herself urgently pursuing a series of images. Take the poem "Irrigator in the Far Field" - "my hand wants to write it. / It's like / a cossack's whirling legs, / gauzy nets hung out to dry, / a Roman fountain pumping / zigzags of spectra . . ." And the comparisons carry on chasing each other from line to line.
In other pieces this interweaving of connections can be more austere, more considered. The collection is interspersed with adaptations from Lucretius, is fascinated by his theory of atomism, by the subtle processes of constant physical change - "A ring wears away. / You do not see the gold go, / thinning day by day."
Memories themselves become part of this process. The series of moving elegies to her parents explore how one kind of activity merges and mingles with another - "how, then, will I be writing of my mother / and the way we miss her, / by writing about the white willowseed." And the book ends with a beautifully pitched poem about telephoning her mother, the final line circling this fragility of things - "your voice, hoarse, and shouting, I'm still here."
The Recreation of Night, by Tamara Fulcher (Shearsman, £8.95)
Tamara Fulcher's The Recreation of Night presents a procession of damaged voices and relationships. The poems are full of subtle and menacing glimpses into the murkier depths of human conduct. Love, here, is something brutal and emptied and the poems savour their bitter voyeurism: "You can imagine the two of them at it; / limbs chiming like silver spoons / and the mirrors, and the bruises after." The writing throughout is barbed and fierce, full of a grim comedy of distaste and relish. Take the poem "Ex" - "I pass him on, / still gleaming with my spit / and rubbed to a white shine." Even when the poetry presents a kind of celebration, the sense of violence and self-destruction is never far away - "It is alchemy in flesh / . . . and afterwards / I want to hang myself / from the beam of his looking." But out of this embattled anger come moments of striking lyricism that feel convincing precisely because they are so wary and so hard won - "Under sunshine / we were made and fed and / under stars our nights will / fade together. Simple / as that I have you."
