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Not Many Love Poems

Linda Chase

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Categories: American
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
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Paperback (96 pages)
(Pub. Sep 2011)
9781847770868
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(Pub. Sep 2011)
9781847779519
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  • 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’.

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


    I Many Love Poems

    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


    II Kisses and Harps

    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


    III Our Lives

    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 
    Linda Chase grew up on Long Island, New York and was educated at Bennington College in Vermont. She later did an MA in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. In between, she was a stage costume designer in San Francisco and Edinburgh, and a Tai Chi teacher, later specialising in Tai ... read more
    Praise for Linda Chase 'The Wedding Spy is a lucid, intelligent collection that doodles with traditional form and which scopes the poet's own life.'
    Vic Allen, North magazine.
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