Footnotes: Poems of Loss, the Passage of Time and Mortality

A yellow plate and plastic fork,In trash-bag tossed, / Tell nothing of the past nor her / Brief life, now lost. / Instead a few sweet crumbs upon / The plate remain, / Remnants of what no longer is. / We share the pain.---from "Crumbs on a Yellow Plate"

In Footnotes, Hamilton area author and poet David J. Forsyth presents a lifetime's worth of poems, many of them dealing with the theme of human mortality. Forsyth has appended a brief footnote to each poem, recalling the circumstances of its creation and the challenges that he faced in writing it. The result is a collection that both readers of poetry and practising poets themselves will cherish.

"A satisfying and inspiring gift to readers.... Death is the topic of many poems, notably the deaths of the poet’s father and grandfathers. But these are not poems of lamentation, they are primarily poems of meditation, intense meditation. They are poems to read, poems to remember and re-read, poems that will connect with your own life and thought, poems to reconsider. They are deceptively simple, and always accessible. They matter." --Alan Bishop, D.Phil.

David J. Forsyth began life as a farm boy, running barefoot and shirtless through hay fields in summer and chasing frogs in a creek that ran through a neighbouring farm. He left school as a commercial artist, but spent most of his thirty-five-year pursuit of an income in supervisory and management roles in municipal government. His positions involved extensive copywriting, editing and technical writing, all of which helped to develop his writing skills. He describes himself as an amateur husband and father, genealogist, historian, mariner, explorer, and photographer. Forsyth's published works include Dafydd (Fifth Concession Publishing, 2014), a memoir of growing up on an Ontario farm in the 1950s, and Too Cold for Mermaids (Rock's Mills Press, 2017), which describes his sailing adventures on the Great Lakes, the North Atlantic and the inland waterways of the United States. He continues to write and is currently working on his first novel, which is based on the true story of a war bride who, in 1919, exiled herself from her family and her beloved England for the love of a Canadian soldier.