Launches were as follows: London - 10 October 2012, Paris - 15 October 2012, Reading - 19 October 2012.
What they're saying about Cape Town:
Kate Noakes' Cape Town poems command our imaginative attention with all the power that the crossroads and lawns, wastelands and landscapes of 'fateful convergence' commanded hers, a visitor from a hemisphere away. Like the stargazers in her 'Kruger Nocturne', 'scanning until our retinas gave way' , Noakes writes with an acute sense of atmosphere reminiscent of the photographs of David Goldblatt, capturing sharply the urgency of the present in tandem always with the long echoes of history.
Jane Draycott
Kate Noakes’s Cape Town takes us on her journey through a landscape that is both engaging and alien, a population at times aggressive, at times welcoming and an intriguing bestiary that includes the almost extinct Quagga zebra 'Each animal uniquely patterned,/bar-coded for its foals to find home'. This is a collection which engages the Rainbow Nation and its radiantly colourful country with a purposeful eye.
Tony Curtis
Review of Cape Town by Lesley Saunders:
'its mission is to bring home to us how varied the world is, how colourful, difficult, urgent, risky, impossible and delightful...and how it conjures from us, if we are both lucky and skilful as she, a fresh and and matching eloquence.'
The complete review can be read here. Review of Cape Town from Fuselit is here. Review from the Cape Times is here. Poetry Wales also reviewed Cape Town in 2013.
A little something from Cape Town, first published in Ink, Sweat + Tears:
Zonnebloem
Hold fast to dreams for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly – Langston Hughes.
Let me tell you how I fill my nostrils with home,
with the girls at the hairdresser, their teenage primping
and perms, pink curlers, hot tongs,
or the boys
at the barbers stopping by for a smoke and a shave
or short-back-and-sides,
and of the choirs,
crooners, jazz bands, their music before it browned,
of football teams and days in the park,
the bandstand and churches, gang fights
down this alley or that, preserved now
in black and white,
and let me tell you
of all the places we went between home and school,
home and mosque, home and synagogue,
I can point to them on the map,
and of baking
and braais or fires on patches of wasteland,
and of the junk and rubbish,
dust and old tyres, the whole wonderful
mess of it, of our teachers, crane-operators,
maids, nurses,
stevedores – fairyland.
You can see the street names here so we don’t
forget them: shepherd, lesar, clifton,
godfrey, parkins, arundel, hamilton,
windsor, tennant, cambridge, constitution,
join me in thanking the man
who saved them
from the bay, and let the other signs
remind you I’m not inventing.
‘I am every stone in this place of stones’.
Now throw open the doors, un-cramp this city
from pews and stained glass, let these voices
shout down the street
over yellow grass,
lumps of concrete. I can see bricks stacking up,
wooden stakes forcing their way
into baked earth. There’s the smell of creosote,
emulsion on the breeze.
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