Lesley Saunders reviews
Cape Town
by Kate Noakes
EYEWEAR BLOG IS RUN BY EYEWEAR PUBLISHING, WHICH PUBLISHES THIS BOOK
The poetry in Kate
Noakes’ previous books, Ocean to Interior
(Mighty Erudite 2007) and The
Wall-Menders (Two Rivers Press 2009), has been described as ‘sensuous and
vivid’, ‘rich in detail’, ‘elemental’, ‘imaginative’, and (by Gillian Clarke)
as ‘loving the world’. The sensitive
observation and formal skill that elicited these comments are there again, with
added vigour, verve and economy of expression, in her new collection Cape Town.
Having for a short
while worked (and written poetry) abroad myself, I marvel at how well Noakes
catches in one hand the vivid impressions of being a stranger in a strange
land, whilst with the other she keeps a firm grip on technical matters of form,
lexicon, sound effects, emotional tone.
She opens with a prologue poem, ‘Hirundine’, which invites us to read
the rest of the book as emerging from – and always returning to – a
delicately-expressed yet unapologetic awareness of her identity as a temporary
resident, a migrant who has flown south.
This disarming first move makes it possible for the poems to sustain
their surprise at the onward rush of new experiences, all senses on alert.
Noakes’ sense organs
are always unjaded connoisseurs of colour, aroma, pattern, atmosphere, of
connection and dissonance of one kind or another. In this book they are also able to detect the
kinds of social and political realities implicated in ‘the fateful convergence
of… peoples’ that is South Africa.
Noakes’ use of an extract from Mandela’s inaugural speech, in which this
phrase occurs, as an epigraph for the book lets us know at once that we need to
understand this work as engagé – though, as we realise almost as quickly, as
much with the demands of poetry as with the challenges of politics.
One of the
astonishing features of the book is the high energy which rarely flags in the
quality of attention any more than the range of subjects. Many of the poems inhabit the natural world
with a witty or bemused intimacy; and many others commemorate momentary
but memorable encounters with people. There
is so much to see, wonder at, be disturbed by, from Cape wildlife – ‘The
Snoek’, ‘Baboon’, ‘Guinea Fowl (helmeted)’, ‘Hadedas’, ‘White ibis and egrets’,
‘A stone curlew for you’ and two poems about the near-extinct Quagga – to the
origins of apartheid (‘The Hedge’) and a sideways look at dictatorship (‘The
dictator’s eyes’ and ‘The dictator’s last days’).
Sometimes the poems
do reportage (‘Flower-sellers, De Waal Park’, ‘Central reservation equinox’),
successfully and satisfyingly – not a word wasted, the images clearer, for
excluding extraneous details, than real life, the adjectives doing their basic
duty of differentiation. So, for
example, ‘southern’, ‘leafless’ and ‘proud’ (of tropical flowers) are the three
adjectives in the first three-line stanza of ‘Central reservation
equinox’; there are none in the second
stanza, and just a pair – ‘red acrylic’ – in the last.
More often, though,
the reporter is part of the subject under scrutiny, as in Razor Wire, which is
quoted in full here:
I walk the razed
section of the city / looking at brown grass, bricks, concrete. // Plastic bags
tatter against the chain link. / The late afternoon sun cuts the air slant. // A
man thrusts his hand through a gap, / braves its metal thorns to shake mine. //
It’s soft, unexpected from the grazes / on his arms, his face, the missing //
chunk of his nose. / Here, here, my sister, welcome.
This understated
self-reflection – which we may miss because it’s the opposite of
self-absorption – functions as a leit-motif that guides how our own attention
is directed towards the people and things that deserve to be noticed, with
enjoyment (‘Espresso, or the best cup of coffee in the world’), suppressed
horror (‘Burying the Hydra’s tooth’ – about finding a puff-adder in her
waste-basket) or bloody-mindedness (‘Green and yellow blanket man, Long Street’
– about being hacked off by a beggar’s daily importuning on her way to work).
The way the poetry
works is also without self-conscious flourish – the command of sentence length,
line-break, enjambment, definite and indefinite article, the spare deployment
of adjectives and adverbs, the compacting of metaphor and simile in exact
phrases, all the small-scale but telling craft-work of poetry, is consistently
meticulous and impressive. It also
manages to be supportive of the overall project, to tell the story of a visit,
framed by two beautiful poems in couplets, ‘Waking up in fairyland’ and ‘Going
to bed in fairyland’. The only poem I
thought had a density, perhaps even a self-consciousness, of expression that
made me think more about the poetry’s construction than about its purpose was
the very last poem in the book, the coming-home epilogue ‘Shabby
land-song’. Well, there’s probably a
poetic truth in there too – home is ‘another place’ where the poet already
‘knows the name[s]’ of things, is more knowing as a poet than she was in South
Africa.
The word that was
used of the (entirely secular) work I did abroad was ‘mission’, and this now
seems to me to be an appropriate word for Noakes’ book, its mission being to
bring home to us how various the world is, how colourful, difficult, urgent,
risky, impossible and delightful living in it can be for the short time we
visit it; and how it conjures from us,
if we are both lucky and as skilful as she, a fresh and matching eloquence.
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