Here are quiet, lyrical poems that go about the important work of connecting art and nature, human and other lives.
Linda Ford realises that if we want to get to know the bigger picture, we have to pay attention to the little things, whether that’s how a lichen spore ‘sails its name in the wind’, or the way a ‘solitary goat hair’ in a paint brush can capture ‘the essence of a lotus flower’. By keeping its eye and ear close to the ground, ‘Lucent’ shows the way to the marvellous.

Chris Powici – writer of ‘Look, Breathe’

Linda Ford’s precise and aptly lucent poetry sings with the pace and beat of nature. Her microscopic eye takes in the smallest plant details as well as the larger landscape – from a dried river bed to the spead of mallow. These are works with both local/locale and international flavour – poems to be taken time over and savoured, read and re-discovered. In ‘Barn Fire’ the poet speaks of ‘the unread world’ and it is this world which delights and informs the reader. In the ‘You Can Feel’ one line reads ‘this picture is about waiting’ and many of the works re-pay close reading with outcomes that surprise and inform. A lovely lyrical volume that would be a credit to any contemporary poetry shelf.

Deborah Tyler-Bennett – poet and fiction writer

Linda Ford’s poems are distilled observations that take the reader into imagistic close up – magnifying the overlooked, from spore to lichen to stone to water. In creating these focused, sculpted knots of language, she slows down time, reveals the almost invisible, relocates it as part of ourselves in intimate contemplation. She conjures her poems with rare grace, a type of self-disappearing modesty, which allows the object under scrutiny to seem to choose its own words, speak in its own voice.
These are poems made in collaboration with nature, listening out and finding precise language that calls to the cells we share with plants and minerals. These poems create alive monuments to the infinitesimal and so do, like all the best art, in a way that confounds formula or logic.

Sophie Herxheimer – artist and poet