Apology For Absence was completed little over a year after Sudden Collapses in Public Places. The themes are familiar, but here she writes with a wider perspective, a deeper understanding, which reach out to the heart of the human condition and the greater mysteries of life, albeit in an understated way. This is a powerful and deeply affecting book, completely unsentimental yet charged with emotion – indeed, one of those rare books that have a profound and lasting effect.
The book’s editor Jo Shapcott wrote: ‘Julia Darling is writing at the height of her powers in this new book of poetry. She has the astonishing ability to dive into that other world of metaphor and vision and to surface with just the right image to express vividly the complex emotional sphere in which she works. Here are poems about chronic illness, friends, daughters, about the fragile beauty of what we have, about dying, but above all about living.’