Not Many Love Poems tells the stories of a life, the stories kept close to the heart: long friendships and shorter love affairs, close bonds of family scattered across transatlantic distances, passion and loss. Loved friends and family, the living, the dead: vital presences.

From recollections of childhood and adolescence on Long Island to warm, unsentimental evocations of the new life-stage of grandparenthood, from adventures with lovers to a journey through breast cancer treatment, Linda Chase writes of a life richly lived, with wit, candour and a feisty energy. At the centre of the collection is a sequence of poems composed during a close friend’s final year. An account of grief and love, it celebrates the gift of ‘numberless, glorious, blessed days’, in which ‘our stories give themselves away’.

Not Many Love Poems shows Linda Chase taking stock, reliving childhood and young adult experience, and above all honouring love and friendship, not least in a series of clear-eyed poems about illness, hurt and loss – poems which nevertheless manage to stay utterly life-affirming. Not Many Love Poems is Linda Chase’s best book and one of the most alive, assured and necessary of any published in recent years - Peter Sansom

Cover Painting by Joseph St. Amand. Private Collection. Reproduced by kind permission

Our Life    11
One Summer Night    12
First Thought    13
The Word for It    14
Be Home by Midnight    15
Old Flame    16
Corsican Summer    17
Fire    18
Airstream Bubble Trailer    19
The Tao tells me to go on loving you    20
Hotel    21
Dare    22
Fallowfield    24
Married Man    25
Late    26
His Book    27
Marriage    28
Separation    29
Old Jewish Men    30
Yesterday    31



Kisses
At Arm’s Length    35
Primary Colours    36
How to Make Breasts Disappear    37
Ticks and Kisses    38
Health Scare    39
Non-Poetics    40
Sleeping    41
Lost Souls from Christie Hospital    42
Radiotherapy    43
Ray Charles Visits Suite 1, Radiotherapy Department,
Christie Hospital, Manchester, England    44
Harps
Pronouncement    46
Max    47
Gift House    48
Care Givers    49
Candour    50
Dwight Way    51
Harp in the Sick Room    52
Dying    53
Asleep and Awake    54
Resting Place    55
Home Funeral    56
The Midst    57
The Twenty-four Hours    58



Taffeta    61
Name    62
Contract for Love and Death    63
Jazzer    65
Winter on Long Island    66
Till Graduation    67
Deceased, Class of 1959    68
Giveaway    69
August    70
We know it’s not the same river every day    71
6 August, 1945    73
Sometimes Snow    75
Prospect Cottage    76
Mittens    77
Banana Crossing    78
On the Way to the Wedding    79
Secret    80
The Crawl    81
The Only Mother    82
Better    83