Poetry review – SUBLIME LUNGS: Paul McDonald is impressed by the powerful imagery and inventive language in this collection by Kate Noakes, which deals honestly with chronc illness
Sublime Lungs
Kate Noakes
Two Rivers Press
ISBN-13 : 978-1915048318
£12.99
I enjoy themed collections, particularly those focusing on lived experience. The cumulative effect of subject-specific poems can offer a stronger sense of meaning and authorial presence than poems in isolation – certainly that is the case in Sublime Lungs, Kate Noakes’s powerful exploration of chronic asthma.
Here the world is perceived through the lens of illness, and we have the impression of life reduced to the fundamentals of breath and breathing: there’s a lifetime of suffering behind her imagery, which frequently deals in extremity: she’s a ‘lone piper/of freezing air’ in “Ice threatens my breath”, and a fire ‘hyperventilating with a purpose’ in “The Breath of Fire”; her ‘inhalation’ is ‘a freezing/draw’ in “Dead ice: the end of a glacier”, and she suffers ‘the labour of smithy bellows’ in “My Breath”. Thankfully she’s not without humour, as in “Poem in which my breath is taken away”, where the title sits above an empty page – an act of darkly comic minimalism which expresses a chilling reality.
Nebulisers offer only fleeting respite for Noakes, and she seeks cures in vain. In “Mint tea is no cure” her ‘chest is a squeezebox’, and in “The Doctrine of Signatures”, she presents the quaint fantasies of the past: ‘If it looks like a lung, say the old priests,/then it can treat them’. She turns to Derek Jarman’s diaries for help in “For ailments of the lungs”, and, in “Not that this stops an asthma attack”, we learn about the limits of yogic breathing. Nothing works, and her poems reflect the inescapable misery of chronic illness. Asthma forces her to acknowledge the boundaries of a body which denies her the luxury of taking life for granted, threatening to become an all-consuming obsession, as in here “Particulates”:
Constantly measuring, the pollution monitor
on my doctor’s surgery roof is compelling.
I visit its real-time online readouts often.
They always show excess.
The act of respiration into a daily battle, creating a world of constraint and constant danger where cats evoke terror akin to Winston Smith’s rats: ‘There’s no starving rat screaming for a woman’s face’ in Noakes’s “Room 101”, just a cat who eats the rat, then slowly approaches a woman ‘tied to the chair’, slinking ‘around/her legs’ – ‘Proteins from her dander close to the woman’s lungs./It takes about an hour’. Such cultural allusions abound in the book, which references, among others, Dannie Abse, Elizabeth Bishop, Joan Eardley, Elaine Feinstein, John Keats, Katherine Mansfield, Charles Olsen, and Joseph Wright. That she should identify with the suffocating bird in the latter’s most famous painting, Experiment on a bird in an air pump, seems inevitable:
Let’s pretend the showman turned
the valve in time
and the precious bird revived,
flew from its prison and lived.
(“Bird in an air pump”)
Sadly escape is restricted to the world of the imagination. However if, like Wright’s bird, Noakes can’t break free of her predicament, she’s relentless in her efforts to interrogate it, placing it at the emotional epicentre of poem after poem: she’s a ‘weird land fish,/drowning in my own air’ in “The countless times you’ve come to my rescue, thankfully”; her cough is ‘like the thwack of a ball on willow’ in “Your unfurled lungs are the size of a cricket pitch”; the ‘air’s sand/and ash will make a hearth in my mouth’ in “Stepping into Blade Runner air”.
Such poems evoke the visceral reality of illness and the internal sensory experience of suffering, but the best for me are those that show illness impacting at deeper levels, including the unconscious. “Hair’s breadth” is an excellent example, playing on the fact that the phrase ‘hair’s breadth’ can be misheard as ‘hare’s breath’. The poem’s two sections juxtapose images of hares, one a child’s memory of two hares in Wales, breathing on a freezing cold morning, the other a description of Albrecht Dürer’s painting Young Hare. In the first section ‘The hares breathe like dragons in the ice-blue air’; in the second the subject is ‘Hunched on a cold kitchen floor,/the field hare quivers,/each hair of its fur distinct and on end’; in this section it’s Dürer the artist who breathes as he paints ‘his supper,/one frightened breath at a time’. The images are linked by references to the cold, the hares, and, significantly, breathing. The poem alludes to the common misuse of the phrase ‘hare’s breath’, playing with the slippage in a way that reflects the significance of breathing for the poet; the piece is placed near the end of the collection, so we know how her life is dominated by breath. It underscores our sense of an illness that eclipses everything for her, but also locates it in a familiar experience that invites us to reflect generally on the phenomenon. Is it surprising that so many of us privilege ‘breath’ over ‘breadth’ – why wouldn’t we, given its fundamental significance in all our lives? It’s a clever poem that hints at a survival anxiety beyond her the poet’s own pathology.
One potential problem with subject-focused collections is that their theme can give licence to poems that wouldn’t work well out of context, but all the poems here are strong on their own terms, whilst also contributing to the effect of the whole. They are poems about illness, but they transcend the level of self-serving therapy, offering relatable witness to personal suffering; like the best poems of this kind, they translate private pain into an accessible and valuable public form.
Jun 26 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Kate Noakes
Poetry review – SUBLIME LUNGS: Paul McDonald is impressed by the powerful imagery and inventive language in this collection by Kate Noakes, which deals honestly with chronc illness
Sublime Lungs
Kate Noakes
Two Rivers Press
ISBN-13 : 978-1915048318
£12.99
I enjoy themed collections, particularly those focusing on lived experience. The cumulative effect of subject-specific poems can offer a stronger sense of meaning and authorial presence than poems in isolation – certainly that is the case in Sublime Lungs, Kate Noakes’s powerful exploration of chronic asthma.
Here the world is perceived through the lens of illness, and we have the impression of life reduced to the fundamentals of breath and breathing: there’s a lifetime of suffering behind her imagery, which frequently deals in extremity: she’s a ‘lone piper/of freezing air’ in “Ice threatens my breath”, and a fire ‘hyperventilating with a purpose’ in “The Breath of Fire”; her ‘inhalation’ is ‘a freezing/draw’ in “Dead ice: the end of a glacier”, and she suffers ‘the labour of smithy bellows’ in “My Breath”. Thankfully she’s not without humour, as in “Poem in which my breath is taken away”, where the title sits above an empty page – an act of darkly comic minimalism which expresses a chilling reality.
Nebulisers offer only fleeting respite for Noakes, and she seeks cures in vain. In “Mint tea is no cure” her ‘chest is a squeezebox’, and in “The Doctrine of Signatures”, she presents the quaint fantasies of the past: ‘If it looks like a lung, say the old priests,/then it can treat them’. She turns to Derek Jarman’s diaries for help in “For ailments of the lungs”, and, in “Not that this stops an asthma attack”, we learn about the limits of yogic breathing. Nothing works, and her poems reflect the inescapable misery of chronic illness. Asthma forces her to acknowledge the boundaries of a body which denies her the luxury of taking life for granted, threatening to become an all-consuming obsession, as in here “Particulates”:
Constantly measuring, the pollution monitor
on my doctor’s surgery roof is compelling.
I visit its real-time online readouts often.
They always show excess.
The act of respiration into a daily battle, creating a world of constraint and constant danger where cats evoke terror akin to Winston Smith’s rats: ‘There’s no starving rat screaming for a woman’s face’ in Noakes’s “Room 101”, just a cat who eats the rat, then slowly approaches a woman ‘tied to the chair’, slinking ‘around/her legs’ – ‘Proteins from her dander close to the woman’s lungs./It takes about an hour’. Such cultural allusions abound in the book, which references, among others, Dannie Abse, Elizabeth Bishop, Joan Eardley, Elaine Feinstein, John Keats, Katherine Mansfield, Charles Olsen, and Joseph Wright. That she should identify with the suffocating bird in the latter’s most famous painting, Experiment on a bird in an air pump, seems inevitable:
Let’s pretend the showman turned
the valve in time
and the precious bird revived,
flew from its prison and lived.
(“Bird in an air pump”)
Sadly escape is restricted to the world of the imagination. However if, like Wright’s bird, Noakes can’t break free of her predicament, she’s relentless in her efforts to interrogate it, placing it at the emotional epicentre of poem after poem: she’s a ‘weird land fish,/drowning in my own air’ in “The countless times you’ve come to my rescue, thankfully”; her cough is ‘like the thwack of a ball on willow’ in “Your unfurled lungs are the size of a cricket pitch”; the ‘air’s sand/and ash will make a hearth in my mouth’ in “Stepping into Blade Runner air”.
Such poems evoke the visceral reality of illness and the internal sensory experience of suffering, but the best for me are those that show illness impacting at deeper levels, including the unconscious. “Hair’s breadth” is an excellent example, playing on the fact that the phrase ‘hair’s breadth’ can be misheard as ‘hare’s breath’. The poem’s two sections juxtapose images of hares, one a child’s memory of two hares in Wales, breathing on a freezing cold morning, the other a description of Albrecht Dürer’s painting Young Hare. In the first section ‘The hares breathe like dragons in the ice-blue air’; in the second the subject is ‘Hunched on a cold kitchen floor,/the field hare quivers,/each hair of its fur distinct and on end’; in this section it’s Dürer the artist who breathes as he paints ‘his supper,/one frightened breath at a time’. The images are linked by references to the cold, the hares, and, significantly, breathing. The poem alludes to the common misuse of the phrase ‘hare’s breath’, playing with the slippage in a way that reflects the significance of breathing for the poet; the piece is placed near the end of the collection, so we know how her life is dominated by breath. It underscores our sense of an illness that eclipses everything for her, but also locates it in a familiar experience that invites us to reflect generally on the phenomenon. Is it surprising that so many of us privilege ‘breath’ over ‘breadth’ – why wouldn’t we, given its fundamental significance in all our lives? It’s a clever poem that hints at a survival anxiety beyond her the poet’s own pathology.
One potential problem with subject-focused collections is that their theme can give licence to poems that wouldn’t work well out of context, but all the poems here are strong on their own terms, whilst also contributing to the effect of the whole. They are poems about illness, but they transcend the level of self-serving therapy, offering relatable witness to personal suffering; like the best poems of this kind, they translate private pain into an accessible and valuable public form.