Ruth France published two collections of poetry in the 1950s and 1960s under the pseudonym Paul Henderson. A selection of these along with poems from a third collection, which remained in manuscript at the time of her death, are published here for the first time. M. H. Holcroft captured the gist of France’s poetry when he wrote that she found ‘her own words for the ancient parables of life and death, and the spinning world’. ‘Her best work, when it tricks on the strange right word and quickens text into living thought . . . is transporting—it opens a threshold and allows us to look upon an altogether elsewhere garden of the mind’. ––from the introduction by Robert McLean. ‘Plainly a real poet is among us.’ ––James K. Baxter (1956)