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My friend Linda Chase, the American poet, who has died of cancer aged 69, lived in Britain for 40 years, but never lost her US accent, either literally or metaphorically. If ever it softened, she told me, she made it shape up. The American grain ran deep and true in every aspect of her work and life.
Linda grew up in Long Island, New York, and studied English and creative writing before moving to San Francisco. There, in "the ecstatic, blurry 1960s", she set literature to one side and worked as a theatre costume designer. She met the British academic Paul Broda and, after insisting on seeing the Grand Canyon first, married him and left for the UK. They soon had two children, Cleo and Andrew, and although the marriage eventually failed, they remained good friends.
Linda's interests included the women's movement, fundraising and t'ai chi. At her home in south Manchester she created a garden and "village hall", an outbuilding that she made available to many groups close to her spiritual and artistic interests.
She returned to poetry in the late 1990s. Her sources were back in America: William Carlos Williams, Frank O'Hara and the Beats. Deceptively informal, her verse is colloquial and uninhibited, both in subject and form. She found material everywhere: in a new lover or in new curtains, or perhaps in a piece of spinach lodged in a tooth. She wrote with a disarming straightforwardness, candour and charm, and swiftly published two collections, The Wedding Spy (2001) and Extended Family (2006). A third, Not Many Love Poems, will be published by Carcanet Press later this year.
Given her social gift, she was bound to contribute to poetry's wider life. Founded with the musician Chris Davies, the Poets and Players series of readings was soon attracting 120 people to the Whitworth art gallery in Manchester. Seizing quickly on social networking, she publicised these readings, and eventually every other poetry event in the region.
Liberality of hand and spirit was Linda's hallmark. Besides her own writing, she gave unforbidding counsel in countless workshops to beginners of every age and experience. This generosity was beautifully expressed in her poem What to Do With Sorrow: "I could take your sorrow out somewhere … / I don't think we will be back early. / Go ahead and eat without us."
Her children, and four grandchildren, survive her.
