While interrogating the tragedy of colonialism and the often fraught nature of exploration and discovery, The Wallace Line: A Poem honours co-existence, a world of merging borders, where the oud can resonate along with the bird of paradise, the blue pigment in a Titian painting with the sound of a Javanese gamelan in moonlight. In celebrating trajectory as artefact the poem is both a call for beauty, and a plea for compassion, in a divided world.