cover image The Gentleness of the Very Tall

The Gentleness of the Very Tall

Linda France. Bloodaxe Books, $15.95 (64pp) ISBN 978-1-85224-287-9

France, a poet from Northumberland, received England's Poetry Book Society Recommendation for this collection of startling, sensuous poems that seem assembled from shards of contemporary life, medieval tropes and the stuff of the natural world. Surreal imagery, grounded in clear, lyrical terms, is often incorporated into the traditional subjects of love and death (one poem is noted to be ``after Neruda''), as when the heart is questioned to be, ``A mollusk/that doesn't know? An act of the imagination?'' France is seen at her best in her vivid poems about animals, in the gorgeous title poem and in ``Acknowledged Land,'' a long piece that imagines life in Northern England a millennium ago. Perhaps most captivating is her natural tone and down-to-earth humor which, when combined with a chiseled, highly wrought style--in forms including long-lined couplets, triplets and indented, staggered stanzas--render the poems both sophisticated and accessible, and leave room for play: ``I levitate, get lost in space, spawn/ holograms of seraphim playing merry hell.'' (July)