What Can I Say? continues from Charles Noble’s earlier book Mack the Naïf, and probes politico-historical phenomena as well as everydayness in varous contexts even up to a kind of unstoppable and stupefying regress but stopped in due course, nevertheless! What, the title, invokes and questions the capacity to speak, asks what is expressible as well as points to what a certain existentialist called ontological guilt, the ornery (from ‘ordinary’) guilt of being a choice-besotted, a choice-encumbered space-time occupier.

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

Award-winning author Charles Noble divides his time between Banff and Nobleford, inhabiting the former for almost fifty years and inhabited by the latter (the strong farm background) for even longer. His world is the world as folded-unfolded, a world riddled with postions and dispositions, of uncanny books both of escape and double-edged capture.