You are Her

Linda France found the title for her new collection, You are Her, on a fading information board at Hadrian's Wall, not far from where she has lived for the past 30 years. Locating and disorientating at the same time, it set the co-ordinates for a body of work on boundaries and identity, damage and absence. Her wise and generous poems seek a place of oneness amidst inner and outer worlds, riven with dualities - the seeming paradoxes of self and society, language and experience, ideal and reality. At the heart of the book is a section looking at Nature and Cultivation through the life and work of Capability Brown, who was born in Northumberland in 1716. These poems consider some pressing questions: how much control do we have over our environment? How does our state of mind reflect the world around us? What, in the end , will endure? A horse-riding accident in 1995 fractured France's spine and cracked her pelvis. This injury, although on the surface healed, re-emerged in the form of flashbacks and chronic pain ten years later when several of her friends died in close succession. Many of the poems in You are Her chart the passage of grief and resolution, a cycle of re-orientation.