Before and After the Darkness: Selected Poems

Before and After the Darkness is the companion volume to the collections Inside the Stretch of the Heart and The Dream of Stairs: A Poem Cycle. The last of these 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 of The Dream of Stairs. Three other volumes are being simultaneously published: Collected Poems, incorporating the above three poetry collections in one volume; and two prose works: A Flock of Blackbirds, featuring a selection of Susan's short stories and novellas, and her novel Drifting Between Empty Tramlines.Many of the poems in Before and After the Darkness and Inside the Stretch of My Heart are 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/susannoble