Inside the Stretch of My Heart: Poems From Morning to Night

Inside the Stretch of My Heart: From Morning to Nightis a companion poetry collection toThe Dream of Stairs: A Poem Cycle, which was privately printed as a posthumous memorial volume in 1975, a year after Susan Noble’s untimely death in 1974 at the age of 31.Susan wrote the poems in batches of half a dozen or more, from 1965 onwards, in what she described as manic bursts of creativity, announcing with her typically light-hearted ironic self-depreciation, ‘The muse has struck me!’ 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 final ten years of her life was prolific and to mark the fortieth anniversary of her death, the poems in this present collection have been published for the first time, together with a revised, expanded edition ofThe Dream of Stairs, a further collection,Before and After the Darkness, along withCollected Poems, containing all three poetry collections.In addition, two volumes of Susan’s fiction are being published:A Flock of Blackbirds(selected short stories and novellas) and the novelDrifting Between Empty Tramlines. Many of the poems inInside the Stretch of My Heartare 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.Profits from the sales of all six volumes are being donated to three charities: Mind, the Samaritans and Sane. Facsimiles of the original typescripts and manuscripts are available online at:www.aesopbooks.com/susannobleBrought up in South London, Susan Noble was the second of three children. Her childhood was enriched by being part of our large and closely-knit Jewish family. Unfortunately stricken by polio (then known as infantile paralysi