It is a great pleasure introducing guest poet Kate Noakes. The four poems are from her new collection Sublime Lungs, published this month by Two Rivers Press.

Carrie Etter writes ‘With each successive poem, Sublime Lungs expands the scope of how this condition affects one’s experience of the world in poems by turns witty and moving.’

You can find Kate’s biography after the poems. On her website you can also find details of future launches in the UK. The online launch is 24 April.

At a lecture on the lungs

Saying they look like cauliflower
is troublesome. I don’t much like it.
Can’t you imagine some other vegetable
for me to care about?

Describing particulate-caused cell change
as columnar to cobblestone won’t do it either.
These are impossible to traverse in heels
and I’ve broken so many stilettos.

Nor does learning of mucus-producing cells,
on the increase and ready for infection,
given this conjures fat black slugs
smearing themselves around in my chest

and in the coastal redwood fog forests,
banana slugs are choking me.

Bronchospasm, barotrauma, embolism

Is it worth it to see anemones
flowering deep, and multi-coloured fish
which never appear to the snorkeler?

Shall I risk it for sea pens and being dyed
by an octopus shooting to her cave
in an ink cloud?

What chances with vicious
silver barracuda and the inevitable
circling sharks?

Enough of purple jelly blobs
faceting rock pools, or their pink selves
unfurled between the tides.

Masked and wet-suited
on the side of a boat
with an artificial lung

a tank of air that will take me, where?
Heaven or hell. Slowly,
cautiously, let me live to tell.

Kent marsh frogs

Oat gold grass, swathes of rush in purple-brown,
the Oare marshes stretch to the horizon.
Mercurial tides leave a slice of silver water
isolating us from the Isle of Sheppey.

Clouds are quickening and the late summer wind
seeds my eyes – a second wave.
Half-blind with redness, I almost miss
the brackish pond with the largest of frogs

– dinner plates are no exaggeration –
and as for the ring-necked grass snakes
waiting in the surface weeds, I watch their vigil
through hay-fever tears.

A snake lunges. And again. The frog
breathes on through skin or mouth or lungs.

Caunes-Minervois

Swifts squadron the sky from early light.
All day they gorge on the wing, resting
only for seconds on the cream-stone sills
of tight-packed village houses.

They catch their breath quick, quickly
under orange-lichened pantiles and are off.
It’s a wonder their small hearts, their lungs
can cope with such long sorties.

There’s never a hint of wheeze
in this warmth and my chest expands
when I can take in the heady scent
of star jasmine. It’s good

there are men in their potagers,
chivalrous enough to cut a stem of roses –
doubles, old-fashioned, and perfumed
to fill my breath with healing.

Biography

Kate Noakes lives in Bristol and has a PhD from the University of Reading. Her new book (her ninth full collection), Sublime Lungs, is published by Two Rivers Press in April 2026. Bog Queens, a pamphlet from Green Bottle Press, is going to be published in June this year.

 She was elected to the Welsh Academy in 2011. Her content rich website, Boomslang Poetry, is archived by the National Library of Wales. Kate’s first non-fiction title is Real Hay-on-Wye (2022, Seren).

During six years in Paris, she was founding president of Paris Lit Up. Kate acted as a trustee for London literature development agency, Spread the Word, between 2018 and 2022 and she is one third of Bristol poetry performance group, Braid. She programmes the poetry events for the Clifton Literature Festival.