It is a great pleasure to introduce this month’ guest poet Kate Noakes. Kate and I met during the first lockdown on Zoom (a group set up by a fellow poet). Kate Noakes’ most recent collection is Goldhawk Road (Two Rivers Press, 2023). Her website is www.boomslangpoetry.blogspot.com. She lives in Bristol.

Earlier this month Kate’s poem The Sick Spring appeared on the blog. It is from her pamphlet, Chalking the Pavement, published by Broken Sleep Books in 2024. At the heart of the book is Field Notes 2020. Field Notes has 65 entries: observations of life during the first lockdown in the form of prose poems.

I’ve chosen five, from the beginning and end of the sequence. All of them show Kate’s acute attention to detail as she ‘captures the soon-forgotten details of the changes to our lives’.

Field Notes 2020

Children are rediscovering, or discovering, the pleasures of chalking the pavement with hearts and messages of love for the NHS. Hopscotch has the thrill of the new, but neither the girl nor her mother knows how to play it. I look around for a handy stone. None are at arm’s length.

*

The slates pathing my garden are sleek with wet. Dust is dampened. This morning after weeks of early summer-in-spring is a change and a good one. I’ll rest indoors trying not to dwell on my friend’s friend: just two years older than us and dead. All day the blackbirds have busied about the garden in search of nesting materials. Such industry, even in the constant day-drip of rain.

*

My neighbour tells me he’s been scaled back to three days a week with attendant pay cut, yet considers himself lucky; most staff in his firm having been let go, along with eight percent of those in hospitality.

*

A windy day for children to learn or relearn the small pleasure of flying a kite. Prescriptions need at least a week’s notice and the pharmacist tells me there is some drug rationing. We have learned that a life is worth sixty thousand pounds; in case you’re ever wondered. And again there is no surprise in discovering that some people believe rules only apply to others.

*

I want my day to always start with a fishing heron and a cormorant drying its wings on the foreshore near the bridge, the tide running out, and the sun brilliant on the water. White stripes on the river path every two metres are a constant presence that it is hard to ignore.