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. His poetry is elegiac, a kind of pastoral to the empty sky and the warm dark spaces of nature, but there is wit too. 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


Cover image: Kenneth Steel, poster for British Rail 1956 (detail). Copyright © National Railway Museum pictorial collection / SSPL. Cover design: StephenRaw.com

Contents

A Cold and Frosty Morning  
Appointments   
The December Ghosts   
The Choir Outing   
Littoral: Bridgwater Bay   
Cottage Garden   
Going Home   
Moths   
Translations   
Everyman’s Enquire Within
    To Go for a Walk   
    To Light a Fire   
    To Prepare for Sleep   
    To Choose a House   
    To Visit a Gallery   
    To Remember   
Silverpoint   
Front Free Endpapers   
Venice   
Legacies   
Singing School   
Border   
Outlook   
Yellow Pages   
Farewell, My Lovely   
Taking Alexander for a Walk   
So It Seems   
Nativity: With Music   
Gaudy Night   
Distances   
Much Ado at Old Hall   
Poem for Tamsin   
Wives of the Great Composers
    Mrs Dowland   
    Xenia Cage   
    Maria Haydn   
    Wilhelmine Webern   
    Anna Magdalena Bach   
    Cosima Wagner   
    Kate?ina Smetana   
    Lucrezia Palestrina   
    Marta Bartók   
    Isobel Holst   
    Dorothy Howells   
    Aino Sibelius   
    Maria Gesualdo   
For a Few Seconds the Bedroom Could Be the
Sistine Chapel Ceiling   
On First Looking into Photographs of Hardy’s Dorset   
Home Again, Home Again     
Scan    
Many Mansions    
The Shivers    
Footnotes    
Little Campstone    
Scherzo Fantastique    
The Flaw    
Two for Meg    
A Piece of A4 Paper    
Passing By    
Under Orion    
John Did Not Know How True A Word He Was Speaking    
Postscript to the Guardian Review of Jane Eyre    
The Last Seven Pictures on the Instamatic    

Notes