Table of Contents

High Maintenance, Impersonation, A Comforting Car Park, Waiting Room in August, Too Heavy, Things That Should Never Have Happened, Satsumas, Insomnia, Healer, Square Dancing, Waiting Room, Don't Worry, Living In The New Extension, Water Power At Cragside, Vanity, Dental Attention, Where The Living Meet The Dead, Things I Have Lost, The Boy's Room, Macaroon, Facial, Afternoon Films,,Doing The Crossword, The Grove, Out of Here, Hospital Geography, Wooden Spoon, The Mill, Turkish Bath, Virginia, Ward Thirty Six, Chemotherapy, Sudden Collapses in Public Places, Ancestry, Convalescence, End.Abou the Author.

About the Author

Julia Darling lived in Newcastle upon Tyne from 1980 until her death in 2005. She began her writing career as a poet and worked with a performance group, The Poetry Virgins, for many years 'taking poetry to the places that least expected it.' In 1998 her first novel 'Crocodile Soup' was published by Anchor at Transworld; it went on to be published in Canada, Australia, Europe and the States and was long-listed for the Orange Prize. Her later novel 'The Taxi Driver's Daughter' was published by Penguin, and long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and short-listed for the Encore Award. She also wrote many plays for stage and radio, including 'Posties' for Radio Four's Women's Hour and 'Manifesto For The New City' for Northern Stage. In 2003 she published her first solo collection of poems called 'Sudden Collapses In Public Places' with Arc Publications. This was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She was an Associate Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund and wrote in a room in the English School at the University of Newcastle. In 2003 she became the second winner of the Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award, the UK's most valuable literary prize. She died just before the launch of 'The Poetry Cure', the anthology she edited with Cynthia Fuller for Bloodaxe, and whilst still revising her novel 'A Cure For Dying'.

Reviews

"Anyone who has ever spent any time in a hospital or in a hospital waiting room will love these poems, anyone who has ever been to the doctor or felt ill or had to fill in a form will love these poems. That covers everyone. Here are poems about a difficult, scary subject, cancer, that circle around it lightly, on light dancing feet, and every so often whack you on the head. Oddly enough, Sudden Collapses is compulsively readable. The poems are funny, irreverent, moving and never sentimental. You can recognise yourself in them, recognise your family. They are warm, full of compassion: Julia Darling's imagination is a shining bright light." Jackie Kay