A Map of the TerritoryPaperback, 27 November 2003

Nigel Forde is a natural poet. There's no sense of striving after effect. It's obvious that both experience and thought make their impact on him in a rich mixture of imagery, rhythm and structure that enables them to be carried to us effortlessly.
Arnold Wesker
A Map of the Territory reflects Nigel Forde's fascination with things in the process of change: music, the momentary insight, twilight rather than night or day. Written over a period of years, the poems meditate on memory and landscape: it is in the unremarkable and evanescent that our lives find their greatest meaning. The book's two central sequences, 'A Map of the Territory' and 'Touchstones', express a way of remaking memories in language. 'Touchstones' is a Hungarian sonnet sequence: each sonnet begins with the last line of the one before, exploring the creative possibilities of strict poetic forms. 'A Map of the Territory' itself attempts to stay true to events as well as to what distance has made of them. The collection maps both a landscape and the mind that it has shaped.