Not Many Love Poems
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.
Carcanet Press 2011, 96 pp., £8.96
Available from Carcanet
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]
Shooting the Breeze
This book was the result of a collaboration with photographer Len Grant. It contains poems and portraits of people Linda and Len met while taking their portable studio to several parts of Manchester. The photographs and poems sit opposite one another, each enhancing the other.
Blurb.com, 2010, 90 pp., £12.95
Available from blurb.com
Extended Family
In the first section, poems celebrate close family relationships as well as those of the extended family, students, teachers and friends. The second section is one love story in a long sequence.
Carcanet Press, 2006, 104 pp., £9.95
Available from Carcanet Press
. . . . . .’Telling You’ is shot through with erotic suspense, delicately potent ‘3lbs 6oz.’ is exquisitely gentle. ‘The Last Sane Thing’ leaves the reader shivering. ‘Limits’ captures the pain of a damaged relationship magnificently, its emotive barb second to none. ‘Pre-Op’ and ‘Beach Story’ make the eyes prickle. This is a gifted and inventive poet, full of energy, craft, delight and despair. But even her despair glitters. [Helena Nelson writing in Ambit, 2006]
The Wedding Spy
Here are poems about Chase’s favourite themes– childhood, America and relationships as well as poems inspired by Tai Chi. This is the book which most focuses on the unsettled legacy of the expatriate.
Carcanet Press 2001, 82 pp., £6.95
Available from Carcanet Press
Linda Chase has a mature voice, encompassing the weight of experience as well as intensity of feeling… She has a laid-back conversational style which can contain a complex and much darker reality. [Jehane Markham writing in Ambit, 2002]
These Goodbyes
Short witty poems are interspersed with the more formal patterns of sonnets and villanelles. The themes cover family, America and of course, relationships. The poems are bold but also sensitive and moving.
Fatchance Press 1995, 75 pp., £4.99
Available from Waterstones
(Linda Chase’s) poems are powerful and mature, sensual and acerbic… This is writing of a high order… a directness that neither evades nor titillates; a curiosity that investigates and interrogates the what-ifs of the human psyche; and a wit that made me laugh out loud. [James Sale writing in Tears in the Fence 19]