Strikingly original, explorer, subterranean, and farmer?philosopher are terms that have been used to discuss Charles Noble and his oeuvre published over the past forty years. The poems collected in Sally O began as hard nosed seeds folding in then folding out of their wrinkled casings, and sprouted forth with contemplated meaning that anchors deep into the soil. This poetry is processed through simultaneously knowing everything, but nothing, of gravity and we are blessed with the harvest: word couplings, imagery, and layering that are as arcane as an apple falling up.

This first retrospective of Noble's controversial career as a dedicated Alberta farmer and cockeyed poet is enlightened with an extensive afterword that showcases his ability to be anything but conventional.

Sink into this collection, wrought with evocative humour and sensuality, implicate and float yourself differently in the drama and conversation of poems that will 'curve you to the wings'.

?Such poems, full of intimate knowledge filtered through an intellectual screen, set Noble's poems apart from the usual prairie anecdotal lyric. — ? Douglas Barbour, Wild Words: Essays on Alberta Literature

?Hearth Wild is brilliantly a poem, a document, an autobiography, a bejesus joy. — ? Robert Kroetsch

?Built like a fullback, Noble exudes energy in his poems, which I might argue are like those of no one else writing in Canada today. — ? John Ditsky, Western American Literature

Since 1972, Charles Noble has been publishing poetry in a modest Canadian literary underground. A few of the titles that have emerged are Doubt’s Boots (U of C Press), Hearth Wild / post cardiac Banff (Thistledown Press), and Wormwood, Vermouth, Warphistory (Thistledown Press), which won the 1996 Writers Guild of Alberta poetry award.

Charles Noble's profile page