To purchase The Wall Menders, please visit Two Rivers Press or if you are in Paris from Shakespeare and Company.
Kate Noakes takes seriously the potential for poetry to change the world. These are observant and imaginative poems, alert to the issues of the moment; they love the world, simple moments of weather, family life, work, landscape, the growing, preparing and relishing of food.
Gillian Clarke (National Poet of Wales)
Her attention to detail in The Wall Menders (whether through memory, observation, allegory, cadence, or the timing of a phrase) is a metaphor for her theme of environmental repair. Reading her poems with the care they deserve gives an intimation of what it might feel were the world in safe hands.
Peter Robinson
Reviews of The Wall Menders
http://toddswift.blogspot.com/2010/02/guest-review-hymas-on-noakes.html
A couple of my favourite poems from The Wall Menders:
Pick a seed, any seed
for the womb of hard soil
bouldered with ice. Entomb
this tattooed keeper
of crop mythology.
Think of it as a one-way
bet with the future
held in a glass ovary
just in case we need
to coax it into life.
There’s more than one
quiet sphere shuffled here.
Two by two they sleep
at the end of these tubes,
suspended in the permafrost,
safe, until with luck
we find an olive branch
and the meaning of dormant
in a flow of meltwater.
It’s semi-religious, waxing my board,
the stroke of a supplicant
praying for a wave.
As I ask for the right grip
between fibre glass
and the soles of my feet,
a swell comes to shift sediments
for the last time, a peak
in the grip of the moon.
It breaks in the estuary,
over salt-marsh and mudflat,
rushing to Severnside.
I see myself riding
that cloud of a wave past
lock gates and cathedrals,
water meadows and tow paths,
from point to down on a cumulous set,
no-one blocking my line,
no drop-ins or snakers,
no board-ditchers on this
final roll of the Bore. 