Book details

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'.

Linda Chase grew up in a suburb of New York City and studied Creative Writing at Bennington College, Vermont. In 1980 she moved to Manchester, England. At the age of 50 Chase began to publish poems in magazines and journals. She then completed the MA course at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her poems have won many prizes, and her first full collection The Wedding Spy was published by Carcanet Press in 2001. In January 2004 a series of 44 poems was published in PN Review under the title Younger Men Have Birthdays Too.

Teaching was an important part of her work. Among other things, she taught residential poetry workshops abroad, often involving Tai Chi and physical movement.
Linda Chase was tutor and North West co-ordinator for the Manchester branch of the Poetry School, and a part-time lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University's Writing School.