Cover painting:
Copyright © Emma Holliday 2004
Cover painting:
Copyright © Emma Holliday 2004
Julia Darling is writing at the height of her powers in this new book of poetry. She has the astonishing ability to dive into that other world of metaphor and vision and to surface with just the right image to express vividly the complex emotional sphere in which she works. Here are poems about chronic illness, friends, daughters, about the fragile beaty of what we have, about dying, but above all about living.
Jo Shapcott
Julia Darling is wise as well as clever, a surrealist and a realist. This beautifully poised collection includes poems about parenthood that took my breath away with their wit, accuracy and tenderness. She is one of those rare contemporary poets who make you feel what it is like to be alive and marvel at it.
Maggie Gee
The poems in Apology for Absence crackle with joy in living and loving; joy in the vivid, weird complicated stage-set that is ordinary life ...
Their voice is confidently surreal, lunging out imaginatively to the world.
Ruth Padel, writing in The Independent
Apology for Absence also serves as inventory, instruction manual, testimony and songbook. These exuberant poems tell the truth about difficult things and, in doing so, change the world for all of us lucky enough to read them. The sheer reach of the work inspires vertigo and breathless admiration: nothing is too small to be insignificant, nor too large to be overwhelming. We are whisked from one to the other, and dazzled by all the life in between (often within a single poem) — fresh, fearless, dynamic, generous. This is what happens when poetry takes risks: 'indelible, miraculous'.
Linda France
Linda France and Julia Darling: photo Roger Cornwell
Apology for Absence was launched at a party "with pink cava, hot nuts and strawberries dipped in chocolate", as Julia related in her diary. "It was," she added, "in the corniest sense, a night I shall always remember. I had a whole range of all my favourite musicians playing songs and poems, and Jackie Kay was my star celebrity guest."
The evening was packed out, despite the rival attractions of a Newcastle home game and the RSC at the Theatre Royal. All the photos on this page, and others accompanying Julia's diary entry, were taken on the night.
Jim Kitson plays as Julia Darling looks on: photo Roger Cornwell
This is Julia Darling's second collection for Arc Publications. Moving on from Sudden Collapses In Public Places, it looks at the world beyond the hospital, although still from the view-point of a cancer patient in the advanced stages of the illness. The themes are familiar, but here she writes with a wider perspective, a deeper understanding, which reach out to the heart of the human condition and the greater mysteries of life, albeit in an understated way. This is a powerful and deeply affecting book, completely unsentimental yet charged with emotion – indeed, one of those rare books that have a profound and lasting effect. Details about how to buy the book are at the foot of this page.
Here are two poems from the collection:
You are on a path, leading to the blue wood,
you are floating. Everything you touch shivers
then blossoms. You have perfect knees, glossy hair.
You are sure of your destination, (breathe deeply.)
You pass a waterfall spilling from a cave,
and an elegant fish leaps from the water.
See its rainbow scales. A kingfisher hovers.
Go to the bank, put your hand in the water.
Pure, ice cold water. Wipe it on your lips.
It tastes of honey and elderflower. Drink deeply.
This water will cure you, feel its cool fire
soaking into your bones. You are strong.
Stay there, with the birdsong, don't open your eyes,
for a wrathful cat sits on your chest.
and your sheets need washing.
Stay with the path. Keep the nettles trimmed.
Don't think of liver fluke. Try to be American.
I can't stop thinking about
that water extractor that Ann mentioned
as she was going out of the door,
that sucked the moisture out of rooms.
I have tried to imagine
its shape, its vast, thirsty tongue,
the sound of its vibrant recesses,
how it knows not to take everything.
Apparently many machines
are available for hire. Extraordinary.
What other machines are there?
Where is the catalogue?
I would like a spiritual cleanser,
an automatic comforter,
a sushi maker, a cat groomer,
a bath essence maker.
a polisher for my arterial corridors,
a machine for blasting rooms with mirth,
a portable bone strengthener,
and a fear shrinker, one for every room.
The Guardian's Saturday Poem on 27 November 2004 was another poem from the collection, Moving to the Country.
Paperback
60 pages
Published November 2004
Price: £6.95
ISBN 1-904614-12-4
Julia has dedicated this book to Bev, Scarlet and Florrie, and to "the memory of my friend Andrea Badenoch".
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Created by Julia Darling and Cornwell Internet. |
Last updated on 29th April 2005 by Roger Cornwell.
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