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'.