The Dream of Stairs: A Poem Cycle 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. Having announced with typically light-hearted self-depreciation, '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.
To mark the fortieth anniversary of Susan's death, this second edition, published in hardback, paperback and Kindle, makes the book publicly available for the first time. 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.
Five companion volumes are also being published: Inside the Stretch of My Heart and Before and After the Darkness are two previously unpublished collections of poems; Collected Poems, which incorporates all three poetry collections in one comprehensive volume; A Flock of Blackbirds (selected novellas and short stories); as well as the novel, Drifting Between Empty Tramlines.
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/susannobl
