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 away”, 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’ 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