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Nigel Fordes communication is, as the Hungarian-born counterpart George Szirtes says, "deeply English". These poems are often in a movable vacant verse, infrequently flashy with rhyme; there are allusions to Shakespeare, Hardy, Keats and Herrick; and they are filled with images of the English countryside: streams, woods, owls, blackbirds, buddleia, moths, squirrels, rivers, moons and stars lots of stars.
Forde additionally has a mindfulness with scholarship (sunlight is "photons from a G-type star") and music. There is a method of poems from the wives of good composers, together with a smart dash from Xavia, John Cages wife: "I pronounced to him, "Cant you keep still for only five minutes?"/ He couldn"t."
His themes are nostalgia, longing, love, memory, the thoroughfare of time, and the strangeness of being a thinking, feeling quadruped in a universe ruled by systematic laws. In the musicality of the verse, the clarity of place, the mania with the intertwining of past and present, and the visit make use of "we" ("We poke for definition in the void"), these poems are suggestive of TS Eliots Four Quartets. Take this book with you on a prolonged sight tour by the English countryside, and suffer yourself.
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