Filthy Quiet, The

'Kate Noakes’ new collection is a trove of rich materials – rare minerals, sharp sense-impressions and resonant myths.’ – Philip Gross Press and Events: Book launch planned at the Poetry Cafe, London, 14 March, 7.30pm. Reviews and coverage planned with The North, London Grip, Tears in the Fence, Under the Radar, Prole, Ink Sweat & Tears, Poetry Review, Poetry London, Poetry Wales, Poetry Ireland Review, Wales Arts Review, New Welsh Review and Planet. Bloggers include Katy Evans Bush, Paul Stephenson, Kim Moore and Martin Cruxefix. Previous Books: Ocean to Interior, Mighty Erudite, 2007 The Wall Menders, Two Rivers Press, 2009 Cape Town, Eyewear Publishing, 2012 I-spy and shanty, corrupt press, 2014 Tattoo on Crow Street, Parthian, 2015 Paris, Stage Left, Eyewear 2017 -- Cyhoeddwr: Parthian Books
This collection has the quality of an incantation; the poems start small, work quietly, but their accumulative force is such that the reader feels something massive has shifted and changed by the end. In this her most autobiographical collection to date, Kate Noakes charts the decline and fall of a relationship and the small, strange pleasures brought by rebuilding selfhood in its wake - the pain and treasure found in the husk of that which no longer is. The Filthy Quiet attends to the dissolution of lives and identities in those in-between moments of contingency, gesture and absence, when communication falls between gaps; and it does so with the concentrated intensity of a person burning letters in a fire, watching them spark. In the title poem, the speaker and her partner gaze at ancient remains ‘on the slopes of Vesuvius’, and though ‘you want me /home, sealed in ashes /or facing another fire’, the experience resolves only in inescapable absence: ‘you /leaving us.’ Dust, ash and detritus pervade the book, signalling the poet’s interest in the material processes connecting body and world: in ‘The threshold’, ‘coconut husks…dried’ that make up ‘[d]oormats’ suggest ‘me… /[in] the processing plant, Tonga, ‘69’, ‘on my cheek /…milk from the macheted coconut’. Bearing traces of departed lives, texts, objects, by-products carry more telling ‘asides’ than do end-products here. The eclectic poems range between sensuous evocations of nature, longing for ‘wild thyme to ‘scent /my thin shirt in a shiver’, to those that push images to absurdist excess, as in ‘Stitching the rose’, whose protagonist is fixated on cutting off thorns, ‘wield[ing] a curved needle /a scimitar of false gut’, her ‘embroidery obsessed by blood’. Some play with the idea of the confessional as ironic intimacy (‘Not that I’m shy about my flesh /though I wish it less scarred and southern’, declares the speaker of ‘Oyster on the tideline’), while others re-write Greek and biblical stories – Medea, Penelope, Salomé – to create their own, modern parables in which ‘You are no saint /and my veils are not translucent’. Like Menna Elfyn or Gillian Clarke, Noakes is skilled at interweaving the everyday with a global feminist (eco)politics in a manner that feels neither forced nor narrowly polemical. The poems are tough-edged, uncompromising in their examination of the damage wrought by unequal gender and power structures. Yet its female subjects are never victims: her Medea is gifted with ‘ruby eyes and silvery tongue’, and ‘stud[ies] rank herbs and the thousands of ways /to conjure death with a phrase’. The botanical allusions that thread throughout present poetry as physic, both poison and cure. ‘The whim of air and light /on water, as any tale /palpable in its writing’, captures the uniquely fleshly feel of this collection. Poems dwell on the spaces where inside meets the outside: the inner ear, piercings of the skin, hunger and consumption. Stone and flesh intertwine, interpenetrate, change places; the human narrative is decentred by the ‘deep time’ of the earth. Female sexuality is identified with the geological: ‘Come then, roll me in the surf. /Let’s see where the current takes us’ urges one voice, presenting silt and drift as precursors to a new self. This book’s attention to the teeming insignificant invites us to rediscover ‘a happiness of small things’; transposing human agency onto objects, its poetic project becomes one of ‘kintsugi’, ‘the art of repair’, filling in cracks with gold. -- Siriol McAvoy @ www.gwales.com