The Choir Outing

Even if you love maps, leave them behind; Try to be helpless and inquisitive. Eschew signposts, landmarks. Take The unassuming path, always; cross The unpromising field: it will take you Out of your own reach into something That becomes you. from `To Go for a Walk'

Nigel Forde's poems explore those feelings, memories and landscapes, glimpsed and momentary, that haunt us with an insistent need to be questioned or commemorated. In monologues and elegies, reflections on art, intimate domestic lyrics, love poems and jokes, The Choir Outing meditates on surfaces and depths with technical assurance and a delight in the moment's gift.

Nigel Forde's poetry is full of grace, ghosts and good music: music in every sense, since he has an acute ear for cadence and form generally. The Choir Outing is a deeply English book, like a late Shakespearean romance: a Forest of Arden complete with the paraphernalia of the modern mind but filled with its own elegant, nostalgic but living music. George Szirtes

Nigel Forde is a poet of love and nature who, with a good deal of humour, takes time to mature his poems before serving them. If, like old wine, they sometimes come in new bottles, that's all the more reason for trying them on your palate to see in how many surprising and various ways they please. Anne Stevenson