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Collected Poems

Collected Poems by Susan Noble incorporates three collections of poems: The Dream of Stairs: A Poem Cycle; Inside the Stretch of My Heart; and Before and After the Darkness. To mark the fortieth anniversary of her death, this comprehensive volume is being published in hardback, paperback and Kindle, making all her poems publicly available for the first time. The Dream of Stairs was privately printed as a posthumous memorial volume in 1975, a year after Susan’s untimely death in 1974 at the age of 31. Having announced with typically light-hearted self-depreciation that ‘The muse has struck me!’, Susan wrote the poems in batches of half a dozen or more from 1965 onwards in what she described as manic bursts of creativity. But these poems are anything but light-hearted, and even a first reading will reveal clearly that levity is not on the menu in a universe ‘Where there are no jokes / And people do not pretend.’Susan’s output in the last ten years of her life was prolific, but when it came to compiling the poems, after a good deal of deliberation, a clear thematic structure and underlying development seemed to dictate the final order of that original poignant collection.There are a number of changes to the first edition: a slight reordering of the poems, minor amendments to the structure of the poem cycle, a revised, enhanced layout, and indexes of titles and first lines. More significantly, the original selection has been augmented by many additional poems, which clearly fit within the cycle thematically and structurally.Many of the poems in Inside the Stretch of My Heart were triggered by the quotidian experience of living and working in central London in the late 1960s and early 1970s, yet beneath the fragile surface of her acute observations of domestic and office life in the city, intensely spiritual insights are being played out, sometimes delicately, sometimes shockingly, but always movingly.The poems in the third collection in this volume, Before and After the Darkness, were written in the early 1970s, like

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