Kate Noakes' take on the world is sensuous and vivid. In Ocean to Interior her powerful vision creates a world rich in detail and meditative narrative, cast with all the visual intensity of a painter. Her formal skill is impressive, and in her landscape poems particularly her ear and voice come together to create cadences that are truly capturing. This is an echoing and memorable first collection.
Jane Draycott
You can listen to me reading Pablo from Ocean to Interior here (http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=18461).
Also from Ocean to Interior:
Ophelia
By the time she really died
there were no flowers left, no pansies,
fennel or rue, no violets, no daisies;
no-one remembered rosemary.
Her Sisters laid her bird body
on grey chapel marble, surrounded
her with stag’s horn and moss,
with ceps, morels, ink caps.
Beneath was a slick of kelp
and bladderwrack, oarweed
and dulse, her salty slipway
to river’s mouth and the tide.
Stolen Fruit
For a few hours I knew infinitely
more than you; my eyes were open wide
and I’d found out all there was. I could see
that this was perfect and beautiful,
while all you saw was a place called garden
and you couldn’t even name the flowers.
For those short hours I tripped about,
happy for the first time, happy the word
I made for it. But as I slept contented
beneath passion fruit, clematis and vines,
you stole the cool plums from my palms and bit
through their bruises into gold, yielding flesh.
Your sons have raided ice boxes ever since,
always sorry and thinking they know best.
