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The Choir OutingNigel Forde
Categories: 21st Century, British
Imprint: OxfordPoets Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (80 pages) (Pub. Apr 2010) 9781903039977 Out of Stock
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 |
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