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London
Called "the flour of Cities all," London has long been understood through the poetry it has inspired. Now poet Mark Ford has assembled the most capacious and wide-ranging anthology of poems about London to date, from Chaucer to Wordsworth to the present day, providing a chronological tour of urban life and of English literature. Nearly all of the major poets of British literature have left some poetic record of London: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, and T. S. Eliot. Ford goes well beyond these figures, however, to gather significant verse of all kinds, from Jacobean city comedies to nursery rhymes, from topical satire to anonymo...
Enter, Fleeing
'Intriguing, Funny, Prophetic' ran the New York Review of Books headline to an admiring survey of the poetry of Mark Ford by the American critic Helen Vendler. The same words could describe Enter, Fleeing, the fourth collection of poems from one of the UK's most distinctive poets. The work gathered here displays Ford's power to amuse and startle, to move and disconcert. A number of short poems recreate moments from the poet's peripatetic childhood, while others dramatise more general states of fear and desire, of excitement and anxiety. As Vendler noted, Ford's recent work frequently addresses post-colonial issues arising from the collapse of the British Empire, as well as the paradoxes and information loops of today's globalised economy. Enter, Fleeing is Ford's most exhilarating and powerful volume to date.
Thomas Hardy
Because Thomas Hardy’s poetry and fiction are so closely associated with Wessex, it is easy to forget that he was, in his own words, half a Londoner, moving between country and capital throughout his life. This self-division, Mark Ford says, can be traced not only in works explicitly set in London but in his most regionally circumscribed novels.
Mark Ford: Selected Poems
An exuberant, versatile, and complex debut US collection from one of the UK's most respected poets.
Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams
Raymond Roussel, one of the most outlandishly compelling literary figures of modern times, died in mysterious circumstances at the age of fifty-six in 1933. The story Mark Ford tells about Roussel's life and work is at once captivating, heartbreaking, and almost beyond belief. Could even Proust or Nabokov have invented a character as strange and memorable as the exquisite dandy and graphomaniac this book brings to life? Roussel's poetry, novels, and plays influenced the work of many well-known writers and artists: Jean Cocteau found in him "genius in its pure state," while Salvador Dalí, who died with a copy of Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique on his bedside table, believed him to be one of ...
Six Children
'Though unmarried I have had six children,' Walt Whitman claimed in a letter late in his life. The title poem of Mark Ford's third collection imagines the great poet's getting of these mysterious children, of whom no historical trace has ever emerged. Conception and extinction dominate this extraordinary new volume from one of the country's most exciting poets; it includes a lament for the passing of the passenger pigeon, a sestina on the Mau Mau insurrection in Kenya (where the poet was born), a chance encounter with a seventy-year-old Hart Crane in Greenwich Village, an elegy for Mick Imlah (whose Selected Poems Ford has edited for Faber), and a moving tribute to that weirdest of religious sects, the Münster Anabaptists. Six Children is Ford's most formally varied and historically wide-ranging volume. It is sure to win many new admirers for a poet whose work has been championed by such as Helen Vendler, John Bayley, Barbara Everett, and John Ashbery.
Soft Sift
Soft Sift is Mark Ford's first collection since the widely praised Landlocked was published in 1992. Barbara Everett has remarked of his recent work: 'Mark Ford's poems are so cool that it's mystifying they aren't cold. But they aren't: they are friendly, touching and very funny. His work exhibits an enormous casual elegance of mind and style, producing work that is witty without pose, refined and subtle without evasiveness.' There are curved stories here, intrigues and quests whose exuberance of plot and sense of quizzical or farcical immersion in the world of appearances is rendered with a light tough and a sure command of tone, staging the conflict between the mind's drift and the 'inflexible etiquette' of form (Gerard Manley Hopkins's 'soft sift / In an hourglass'). The making of these condensed dramas is often the unmaking of the person speaking, whose 'frets and fresh starts' reveal an original sensibility concerned not with self-display but with a general comedy of wrong moves. Mark Ford has been compared to an American Philip Larkin, or an English John Ashbery, but his poetry is in fact, as John Bayley has remarked 'wholly sui generis'.
Savage Messiah
The acclaimed art fanzine’s psychogeographic drifts through a ruined city Savage Messiah collects the entire set of Laura Oldfield Ford’s fanzine to date. Part graphic novel, part artwork, the book is both an angry polemic against the marginalization of the city’s working class and an exploration of the cracks that open up in urban space.
A Guest Among Stars
A Guest Among Stars collects recent essays by one of the most respected poet-critics of our time. Mark Ford discusses poets and their work, exploring context and settings behind some of the most prominent figures and works of poetry. The figures considered here range from Guillaume Apollinaire to Ezra Pound, from Derek Walcott to Joni Mitchell. The book's title is drawn from a poem by Douglas Crase, whose oeuvre is assessed in its final essay. An appendix present an enchanting selection of letters received by Ford from John Ashbery, whose work Ford has edited for the Library of America. These letters date from 1986, when Ford was at work on a PhD thesis on Ashbery, to the final missive Ford received in late 2017.
