Startling

Linda France's tenth collection is galvanising, comprising poems written from, and into, the fabric of the sixth mass extinction. Here, beginnings end and endings begin, as we leap across time and space and encounter the inter-connected nature of emergency. France harnesses the power of innate ecological awareness, refreshing both individual and collective imaginations in order to create a lasting synergy between nature and culture. Grounded in seasonal fieldwork and close observation, these poems call for a rewilding of the self as well as the landscape: a momentous task, that, as France demonstrates, can only be achieved through the radical act of tenderness.

Linda France lives in rural Northumberland. She has published nine collections of poetry since 1992. Linda won the Poetry Society's National Poetry Competition in 2013 and received a Society of Authors' Cholmondley Award in 2020. In her role as Climate Writer with New Writing North and Newcastle University, she curated Murmuration, a collective film poem (with Kate Sweeney), followed by the collective sound poem Dawn Chorus (with Christo Wallers) and the podcast series In Our Element.