NOVELIST, poet and literary activist, Julia Darling (1956-2005) was a phenomenon.

She wrote for radio, TV and the stage. She co-founded the feminist performance-group The Poetry Virgins, taking poetry to housing co-op AGMs and women’s refuge coffee mornings.

She helped set up the feminist press Diamond Twig and was involved in establishing Proud Words, the first gay and lesbian literary festival in England, now an annual event on Tyneside. She was also a member of the Communist Party.

Indelible, Miraculous: The Collected Poems of Julia Darling (Arc, £11.99) is published to mark the 10th anniversary of her death from cancer.

Edited by her partner Bev Robinson, with an introduction by the poet Jackie Kay, the book includes all the poems from her two full-length collections Sudden Collapses in Public Places and Apology for Absence, as well as a selection of unpublished and uncollected poems.

It is a shame that the collection includes so few of her poems from the Poetry Virgins’ anthologies and only one from Darling’s first collection Small Beauties and does not include her long The Manifesto for Tyneside upon England.

But the book contains most of her best-known poems, popular favourites like Two Lighthouses, Rendezvous Cafe: Whitley Bay, Buying a Brassiere, Newcastle is Lesbos and Be Kind:

“Be kind to white male southern students... don’t attack them on your bicycle,/grazing their shins as you pass,/not saying sorry./They don’t all vote Conservative/ and pull their trousers down.”

Then there is the perfect title poem Indelible, Miraculous:

“friend, think of your breath/on a cold pane of glass/you can write your name there/with an outstretched finger/or frosted, untouched grass/in the early morning, a place/where you can dance alone/leave your footprints there/a deep pool of silver water/waits for you to make waves/the beach is clean after the storm/the tide has washed away yesterday/we all matter, we are all/indelible, miraculous, here.

Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1994, Darling became very good at exploring the geography of illness — hospital car-parks, corridors and waiting rooms.

She studied the strange lexicon of cancer, its emotional grammar and unexplained rituals.

The book includes a series of brilliant post card poems written for the First Aid Kit for the Mind project, notably How to Deal with Terrible News, How to Negotiate Hospital Corridors, How to Frighten Cancer and How to Behave with the Ill:

“Approach us assertively, try not to/cringe or sidle, it makes us fearful./ Rather walk straight up and smile... Please don’t cry, or get emotional,/ and say how dreadful it all is... Remember that this day might be your last/and that it is a miracle that any of us/stands up, breathes, behaves at all.”

Although Julia Darling wrote a lot about illness and dying, she was the most life-affirming of poets, addressing death head-on with an extraordinarily flamboyant rebelliousness, warm wit, and kindly observation, qualities found especially in the previously unpublished poems written during the last months of her illness, notably Travellers, I Don’t Want Anything, Vanities, Night Moment, Dark and Light, A Night Off and the wonderful Entreaty, the last poem in the book:

“Let death be a comrade, let death be a laugh,/ let death be like sinking into the bath./ Let all my friends say, after I’ve gone,/‘She certainly knew how to die, that one!”’