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sheenaghpugh
Kate Noakes is a much travelled poet who has lived on several continents, and this collection is arranged in sections labelled “Home”, “Away” and “London Tree”. Since quite a lot of “home” also concerns London, the collection is by way of an exotica sandwich.
Sense of place is obviously important to her poetry, and London in particular strikes me as sharply evoked, eg in “Samaritans are waiting for our call”:
Hammersmith Bridge is an old athlete, tired and struggling to hoist
her barbells; her belt’s gold and green can’t hold her twisting spine.
Her span is tensed between thick limbs and near breaking point
Australia too comes over as lived experience rather than a visitor passing through:
She wants the kind of sun that draws tar
from telegraph poles, closes heavy curtains
and prises windows open
(“Collected in 1968”)
The voice in these poems often has a touch of humour, as when she is musing on her mother’s tendency to imagine disasters in any region her daughter travelled to, or recalling buying a teenage bra:
The Balcony, a tough construction
of white and steel underwiring
a fine proportioned vista over Verona,
where my twin Juliets can run out
just so far under sun and stars
(“Growing Up for Boys”)
The environment is a preoccupation of several poems, and works best when combined with this sense of humour, as in “Waiting for Ikebana, Mayfair”
Early November, and already
Christmas decorations bling
the street. The restaurant’s standard bay trees are baubled
in tasteful oranges and pinks.
Outdoor heaters release
pyramids of fire.
A preened young man
shows off his grooming
on video chat. Sunday morning,
sunny, and I am about to do
precise things with flowers.
I know we are living in the end
of days. Still, there is art.
The touch of self-deprecating humour helps stop poems on this theme sounding preachy. What also works is obliquity, notably in one of the Australian poems, “The Firebox”. On the surface, this account of family preparations for possible wildfires is a purely foreign experience; only gradually do we come to realise that it is valid for environmental catastrophes worldwide:
In the hall cupboard we keep the firebox: toiletries,
changes of clothes laundered monthly, our precious
things – photos, jewellery, insurance certificates.
We’ve never had to haul it into the Ute.
It’s a comfort, assuming we are at home at the time
and have some kind of warning.
Not all the poems on this theme are quite that subtle, and now and then I did feel preached at, particularly at the end of “Crows are misdirection”, where I think it was the phrase “what we should fret about” that was fatal to the tone.
One thing that continually puzzled me was her choice of titles. You could call them quirky, but inexplicable would describe some better. Sometimes they are decipherable with work; I think the clue to “Spring weddings, save the date” is that “save” is being used to mean “except for”, rather than “reserve for later” – though if so, “save for” would have been clearer. But others, like “Samaritans are waiting for our call”, “It’s the scene of night sweats”, “Earth surface sediment transport” and many others, still defeat me; I can’t see how they relate to their poems, or what they are aiming to say about them.
I also think “Heritage 2020”, otherwise a strong poem, would be better without its last two lines, which articulate a thought that would surely occur independently to any alert reader, and the constantly repeated phrase in “Flat holm/Steep holm” similarly hammers the point a bit too much.
However, the temptation to say too much only occurs when a poet does at least have something to say. The strengths of this collection lie in the fact that it does, and also has a sharp, interesting voice to say it in. And the sense of place, and of people in a place, is very strong. In “As the muddy Mississippi”, one of the poems set in the US, two writers meet at a café. They
buy morning coffee,
and write. I journaled.
You edited a play
That “I journaled” could jar horribly, did not one realise how economically and naturally it conveys the milieu: in London one writes a diary, there, no doubt, one journals. It is a piece of observation, and assimilation, typical of the chameleon-like nature of a writer at home in many different places.
