LINDA FRANCE was born in Wallsend, Newcastle upon Tyne, in 1958. 
Her poetry collections are published by Bloodaxe Books: Red (1992), The Gentleness of 
the Very Tall (1994, Poetry Book Society  Recommendation/Los Angeles 
Times Book Award longlist), Storyville (1997) and The Simultaneous Dress (2002). 
Bloodaxe is also to publish The Toast of the Kit Cat Club, a verse biography of 
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) poet, traveller and letter-writer. In 1993 I edited the 
acclaimed anthology Sixty Women Poets (PBS Special Recommendation) which went 
into its fourth edition in 2002.

She has written two stage plays: Diamonds in Your Pockets, commissioned and performed 
by Theatre sans Frontieres in 1996, and I am Frida Kahlo, commissioned and performed 
by Cloud 9. 

Her poetry has been performed on radio and television and she gives regular readings and
workshops around the country. Her poems have appeared in various newspapers,
magazines and anthologies.

She has received various awards and fellowships for her work, including the first 
Arts Foundation Poetry Fellowship in 1993, as well as the Basil Bunting Award two years 
in a row (1989 & 1990) and fellowships at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Eire, 
Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, USA and Hawthornden,Scotland.

She taught creative writing in schools, universities, for the Arvon Foundation and 
with community groups since 1985. 

 

Audience

I am no longer there.  All I am
is a machine in jeans for listening,
for looking.  The music only knows
what it is because I am here
being not there on this balcony.
The grand piano is a dazzle
of polished black and spotlights.
The inside of me is happy
and highly strung.  We tap our feet
as one foot.  We clap our hands
as one hand.  The I that isn’t there
feels the sting of it, the thrill
of being a field of things growing,
magic beans, a small piece 
of this world knowing what it is.
The music is king and we are audience,
subjects and objects of sound.
The I that I was is no longer there.




CORONA

‘Life organises itself around what is hollow.’
			 Louise Bourgeois



Hollow like the shell of an egg.

Hollow like a room that is empty and waiting.

Hollow like a pipe you coax into tunes with your elbow.

Like the nib of a pen, an ink well.

Hollow like a bone worn smooth with rain.

Like a clay bowl, its crackled glaze.

Hollow like a corona of yellow petals.

Like your throat, the burr of it.

Hollow like a trumpet you fill with all the air inside you.

Like your heart, your open heart.
The Music Room


Even when she isn’t in it, she knows
the room is full of music.  It lives
in the crimson gathers of the curtains,

behind the firescreen painted with dahlias,
a single bee.  It floats above the sconces,
the picture rail; nestles in the sturdy hearts

of highland cattle framed on the west wall.
sometimes she’ll pause at the door and listen,
hoping to surprise it out of the silence

that always falls when the threshold
is crossed.  And it happened once.
She realised later she’d brought it with her,

day clinging to her clothes like smoke,
the taste of B flat at the base of her throat.
This room knew it was a safe place.

This room knew what she yearned for.
And the music knew dreaming was better
than keeping, winter songs before light falls.