sheenaghpugh | Review of Sublime Lungs by Kate Noakes, pub. Two Rivers Press 2026 (Reply)

Humpbacks off the starboard bow, blowing and blowing.
One breaches for the sheer joy of it
(“Stellwagen bank and a god’s breath”)

This is one of your “themed collections”, the theme being, basically, living with severe asthma, though it does sometimes go wider, to consider the lungs and the act of breathing in a more general and indeed sometimes metaphorical sense. Themed collections can have the advantage that poems play off against each other, illuminating the theme from different angles, a bit like Monet painting Rouen Cathedral. The different angles are crucial, because with a collection on one theme there are always the dangers of repetition and monotony.

One way of avoiding these dangers is by thinking figuratively, finding various images in which to encapsulate and convey the act of breathing and the impediments to it. In “Ice threatens my breath”, the image is that of bagpipes, and sharply evocative:

the lungs
steadfastly Scottish,

      as when an infection
     has me struggling to inflate them,
     only to expel air

too, too quickly
from the goatskin bag.

I drone for days

And the image of the “stone dresses” in “Asthma is dressed stone rasping”, though not as immediate, is convincing to anyone who has seen an asthmatic fighting what clearly feels like a stone wall. In “The living death, a childhood nightmare”, Snow White “in her glass coffin” is a striking likeness for the girl in hospital:

      Immobile, she is condemned to forced breath,
     this living-death-iron-lung no handsome prince
     can rouse her from.

In those poems that relate directly to her own experience there are inevitably personal references and not all communicate equally well – I am still puzzled by the line “my certificate will say I died like little Ella” (“Particulates”), because I don’t know who she may be; a literary or film reference or something more personal – I even wondered momentarily if it might be a mistake for “Little Eva”. And “Common ground”, quoted in full, totally lost me:

I can’t breathe because of the environment
and five defective genes.

You can’t breathe because in this environment
the police think all your genes defective.

I can only suppose the “you” of the poem is someone she knows and I don’t, but the poem’s intent eludes me.

Many poems, though, go beyond the personal into a world where the naturalness of breathing, which most of us take for granted, becomes an envied luxury:

      The frog
     breathes on through skin or mouth or lungs
    (“Kent marsh frogs”)

The “lungs” of the world itself are in danger, as we all know (well, all except the climate change denial nuts) and in “Dead ice: the end of a glacier”, the image of breathing is persuasive and illuminating throughout:

Winter’s snows are its inhalation: a freezing
draw, replenishment.

Another successful poem, I thought, was “Painting for people with asthma”, which vividly conveys what may not be obvious to a non-sufferer (as it happens, I am married to an asthmatic, so it especially resonated with me):

      Everyone is clasping their hands to their breasts.
     This does not signal love or respect
     or their hearts being touched. […]

      Their faces have changed colour –
     to scarlet mostly from the strain of inhalation.
     Somehow scant air needs to be rendered
     as a trail of fine smoke or thin wind.
     Cigarettes are often involved.

I also liked “Pearl fishers” up to the last line and a half. But perhaps the most convincing of all the metaphorical takes on the theme was “How the night breathes”:

      in the random shufflings of tiny creatures
     in the hedgerow trying to stay alive,
     and in the longed-for call of the tawny owls
     making a swift end to them.

I’ve always been a little wary of themed collections, feeling that the occasional weaker poem may sneak in because it fits the theme, when in a non-themed collection it would have been culled. I don’t think this is totally immune from that tendency, but mostly the poems earn their place and enable the reader to see the world from an unusual and thought-provoking angle.