Apology for Absence, by Julia Darling<br/>The Poetry Cure, edited by Julia Darling and Cynthia Fuller

Poetry postcards from the edge of life

The poems in Apology for Absence crackle with joy in living and loving; joy in the vivid, weird complicated stage-set that is ordinary life: "I love the smell of my daughters reading... / The downy light touches their heads,/ their bodies untangle on the long red sofa/ they have forgotten mirrors, clothes, tomorrow."

Their voice is confidently surreal, lunging out imaginatively to the world. "My Thumb in Leeds", for instance, celebrates a day out: "My thumb is on holiday.../ It flicks the remote, orders room service,// It rides in my pocket. It's pink, / enthusiastic. My thumb takes photographs."

These supple poems, love poems to daughters, lover, the world and its scurrying inhabitants, the "Mambo beat" of the salsa class, are the more miraculous because they are also all about dying.

Julia Darling had cancer for ten years. The surreal optimism and honest, generous voice of her weblog moved and welcomed everyone who read it. Bright yellow, swollen, bald, witty and determined, she got out of bed for the first night of her latest play two weeks before she died. That thumb on its holiday "touches sculptures" in the art gallery and "resolves to take up painting", but also "touches clothes/ on rails in Harvey Nichols" and sighs: "It carries the cases home, grips on tight./ That's all a thumb can do. Hold on."

No sentimental self-pity: amused, inquisitive and graceful, these poems are beautifully cadenced statements about living, little wiry structures shored against the dark. "Dying is very surreal," she said, and poems like "Ways of Discussing my Body" or "Days of Terrible Tiredness", find vivid images for awful things happening to the body: colour, swelling, exhaustion, melt and pain. But their words are always the necessary ones to make a strong, healthy, nourishing poem.

The same directness also drives The Poetry Cure, an anthology of modern poems about being ill. It bubbles with energy, grace, strength, quirkiness, the most needed truths of relationships and life experiences, created by some of the best names in the business: Derek Mahon, Les Murray, Jo Shapcott, Kathleen Jamie, Roger McGough, Elizabeth Bishop,and many more.

It opens with "Admissions". The first step: admitting you are ill, being admitted to hospital. Halfway through comes "What it feels like", the metaphor angle. Images help us grasp and communicate what is otherwise unmentionable or unbearable. It ends with "Talking to the dead." For we all need poetry, though many people only find this out in crisis, pain and loss.

The Poetry Cure shows how poetry, with its metaphors, can reflect back what we are privately feeling and help us express and bear what is happening to us. This beautiful and humane anthology should be on the waiting room of every ward.

Ruth Padel's 'The Soho Leopard' is published by Chatto

Buy any book reviewed on this site at Independent Books Direct - postage and packing are free in the UK