Humbly Dasein or “being there” and super-focused; heavyweight researcher, lifter, and award-winning writer; farm-rooted and globally haunted Charles NOBLE is now often off-farm in Banff at his Saltlik “office.” A regimen of gym days and measured drinks of wine and coffee underwrites voluminous reading all to power up a style that teases and tilts at this historical material world.

Noble’s Mac the Naïf is all over the place, spinning an incidental mosaic, where mini-narratives or “short hairs” are dropped and picked up to ghost then a trans-narrative over a gallimaufry of pop-up poems, living ends against this kindly arc.

He says conversation, his aesthetic gambit, “can be bait for the research reading I do—letting it bite when it’s ready. And conversation includes the much maligned anecdote and ordinary observations, and the fish” (interview with Steven Ross Smith in Westword).

Of Sally O, his selected poems: “What does add up, from the crazy arithmetic of Noble’s verse, are witty, arresting descriptions that put Noble in league with Kroetsch…and Purdy…” — Kaya Fraser, Canadian 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. Also a dedicated farmer, Noble works the land of his family’s farm in Nobleford, Alberta and spends a significant amount of time in Banff.