Trace Lines

This book is a collaboration, a celebration of words and images.

Combining artistry in poetry, image making and painting, the book explores through word and abstraction, responses to themes of family and connection, travel and memory, and the significance of the trace lines we leave in our individual and collective lives. 

The poems and abstract images attempt to make sense out of the unusual or incidental. They speak to each other, finding safe keeping from otherwise meaningless traces.

David’s first collection of poems are, at heart, relational and quizzical observations of the peculiarities of daily living. The haiku form holds the ephemeral and detached experience of travel while sonnets and formal poetic structures are reserved for more serious subjects. 

Lindi’s accompanying images comprise photographic lines, patterns and obscure details, as well as explorations of abstraction in painting. Her work can be read as traces of travel, place and curiosities like rain running down a Kyoto wall on a gloomy day or a chalk drawing on a Parisian street board. There is an intrinsic and unsung beauty in the ordinary to which Lindi’s images and paintings allude.

Placing our poems and images together in this book has been a serendipitous experience. We hope you enjoy what we offer you as reader and viewer alike and find within these pages trace lines of your own.

'Erudite and heartfelt, the striking imagery in Trace Lines: Poems ' Images deftly navigates the difficult terrain of late middle life, with its losses, complex loves, and unexpected joys. Words and visual images combine to create a greater music: sometimes in counterpoint, at others in harmony, the juxtaposition of one with the other elucidating both.' ROGER AVERILL, Author

'In this striking collaboration, poet David Bryson and artist Lindi Forde combine their strengths to create a collection of meditations on life. Trace Lines is a conversation between Forde’s beautiful and thought-provoking images, and Bryson’s delightful lyrical poems. On a first reading, the images appear to add a layer of meaning to the words, but the poems are as much of an illumination of the images. Each reading provides fresh insight into the interface between text and artwork, but also, into each individual poem and picture. This is a collection to which I will keep coming back for another read, another look.' ANNAROSA BERMAN, Author

'These poems demand a second and third reading, because they reveal more than at first sight seen. They all draw on emotions evoked by life situations – ‘our lives at points of failure/ dissonant by desire or simple-mindedness’, but lives at every imaginable point: joy, pain, suffering, loss, death and dying. But within each carefully crafted sentence there are other contrasts, constantly changing metaphors, tricks, puns, absurdities, which enrich farther reflection. Philosophy, theology, politics make their comment.

More is reflected in the accompanying image – painting, photography, both. Allusions abound. This is a book for quiet, uninterrupted times, when the soul needs silence and colour, and the brain, worthwhile work.'

ROBERT GRIBBEN, Theologian

'Words and images have always been such worthy companions. These pages recall an intimate exchange of love and admiration for each other, as well as a collaboration of art and literature. 'BRUNO LETI, Artist