Maggie Norton has worked in primary schools in Lancashire and Cumbria, and tutored in F.E. and Lancaster University’s Department of Continuing Education. She edited the poetry anthology ‘Swarthmoor!’, two prose and poetry anthologies, ‘Telling Tales’ and ‘Winter Tales’, and a novella, ‘Weekend at the Midland Hotel, 1934’.

She leads writing workshops throughout Cumbria, and is published in many magazines, anthologies, on radio and in translation.

Working to commission she collaborated with videographer Kate Harrison Whiteside on two videopoems: The Bundle on the Dresser pamphlet and DVD for Kendal Windows on Art, and Making Hay pamphlet and DVD for the Yorkshire Dale National Park Authority. For radio and Littoral Arts she created the CD and pamphlet ‘Kurt Schwitters – in Praise of Life’.

She was invited to become South Cumbria Poet Laureate in 2007.

Other Publications:
Poems for children in Macmillan’s anthology for schools, Read Me at School and Scholastic’s Drama and Short Plays and poems and stories in B.B.C. Playdays magazine.
Brantub the Dancing Bear, published by Random House
Come Ride and Ride Again, poetry collections for primary schools.
Pamphlets: Planning the Route and Love and Stuff

Invitation To A Meadow

Come to a meadow in sun or rain –
always glorious interest, startling,
that seriously entertains

study; ramble alongside bling-bling
jewels of bright yellow in May.
What’s about landscape that makes us sing

its praises? We say ‘Lovely! And way-
marked!’ as if only that matters,
as if a stroll by a river passes a day

out the house. Landscapes replenish
the spirit, that poor unacknowledged
child of our time, who may astonish
 
with its own rich harvest if encouraged
by a quiet dressing of green meadow,
where a dialogue with unmasked self is language

stripped of any lie that casts a shadow
like a thing that should as well
have been left unsaid, whose sad echoes

resonate further than one can tell.
Here is unfiltered experience,
for a living dale casts its spell

and kindness to self swells in its influence.
Companioned by like-minded cherishers
of landscape, an eager audience

hears the Dee’s nourishing overtones,
their crescendo and diminuendo, flow
through the beauty of a flowering meadow.

A Late Love Poem

I didn’t think I’d feel like this
when I bumped into you on the Penrith line

after twenty-four years
three months and seven days.

I didn’t think it would feel like a guard
demanding the fare I’d already paid.

Sea Change

River Crake crawls from Coniston reeds,
  licks his hunger at the feet of yellow flag,
  bellies out to Allen Tarn.
  Pauses.

Sprawls in the silver midday heat;
  skin flattens in the millpond hush;
  sway of weed presses out
  slow breath.

Damselflies pinned in length like
  sapphires enamel his shimmering face,
  stitch reeds to fringe his body.
  Skin ripples.

Eels throb thin pectorals
  thrust power along his flanks,
  ease him over jostling pebbles.
  Force entry.

Cows ignored, he squeezes under
  bridges, slithers into Morecambe Bay,
  swells to a sly serpent lurking.
  Quicksand.