Mark Ford - (Paperback)

About the Book

An exuberant, versatile, and complex debut US collection from one of the United Kingdom's most respected poets.

Book Synopsis

Selected Poems charts Mark Ford's growing complexity as a writer and his mastery and use of form. John Ashbery calls Ford's work "refreshing" and it's that exuberance and goodwill that animates the poems, giving them their spontaneity and leavening the grim with comic élan and joy. Myth, history, and the everyday are all at play in this wonderfully diverse collection.

Invisible Assets:

After he threw he through a
plate glass window, nature seemed that much closer.

Even the dastardly division in society
might be healed by a first-rate glazier.

Of course, on Sundays families still picnicked
boldly on the village green, and afterwards

marveled at the blacksmith's glowing forge--
how strong they all were in those days!

And yet how small! Even a man only six foot tall
was then esteemed a veritable giant.

Surely the current furor over architecture
would have evoked from them only pitying smiles.

Meanwhile the market for landscapes has never
been firmer. This view, for instance, includes

seven counties, and a bull charging around in its paddock.

Mark Ford was born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1962. He has published three collections of poetry and a biography of the French writer Raymond Roussel and is the editor of Frank O'Hara's Selected Poems. He has also translated Roussel's New Impressions of Africa and is the editor of London: A History in Verse. He lives in London, England.

Review Quotes

Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year

"[Mark Ford's] work opens up emotionally, like a rolling vista that unfurls after a long hike through dense woods. . . He has a stethoscopic ear for the sounds disappointment can squeeze from a human heart." --New York Times

"Mark Ford, perhaps [Nicholas] Moore's most brilliant disciple, has recently published his own Selected Poems . . among my favorite poetry publications this year."--New York Times Literary Supplement

"If there is an unspoken limit on how many exclamation marks a poet should use during their career, British poet Ford has surpassed it with bursting, exuberant abandon. . . these selected poems are an exercise in play that energetically flaps against time. . . This collection should make Ford's name a familiar one to more American readers." --Publishers Weekly

"Intelligent, restless originality." --The Guardian

"This is not a poetry of incident and handily derived précis but rather of choreographed tension and inspired utterance." --Albert Mobilio, New York Times

"Ford's poems, elaborated from a witty and sinister imagination, 'work' in that instinctual way, allowing details to rise into salient being and beautiful formal shape for the reader as for the poet." --The New York Review of Books

"Ford helps American readers take pleasure in seeing with fresh eyes a country they know too well to notice. . . poetry this strange, felt, terrifying, physical, cerebral, and real is indeed a conjuring act." --Boston Review

"...his poems are nothing short of carefully contained energy." --Cleaver Magazine

"Ford is at once a veteran of pop culture and a connoisseur of the desperation of high culture, an indoor reader of the past but also an outdoor breather of physically felt atmospheres. His generation of English poets is still in formation but I believe Ford to be one of its eventual definers, as Ashbery was crucial to postwar writing in the United States." --Helen Vendler

"Ford's poetry is light and agile and sometimes sweet, but it also has a disconcerting way of turning sharp and naughty and even sinister." --John Ashbery

"Readers who like some puzzles along with their pleasures, and who admire sophisticated thinking in verse, will find Ford one of the best young poets we have--one attuned in sad, clever, intricate ways to how we speak now, and what we suspect of ourselves." --Stephen Burt, Times Literary Supplement

"[Ford's] dark episodes--slightly surreal, unnerving, and often farcical--unroll before us, as on a screen of rapidly changing images, while an enchanting voice-over, in a diction all its own, tells its painful, accurate and self-mocking tale." --London Review of Books

"Through the years British poet Mark Ford has developed a singular and spirited body of work that has a winning combination of erudition and whimsy. He is a 21st French century fantast with deep roots in romanticism and modernity. How fortunate now to have this generous selection of his life poetry." --Peter Gizzi

"This generous Selected Poems is the ideal introduction to the work of Mark Ford, a British poet who is, thankfully, no respecter of literary or geographical boundaries."--Friday Night Boys

"At long last, American readers can possess a substantial selection of Mark Ford's poetry. These are poems of serious play, relentlessly experimental but grounded in quotidian specifics, characterized by a consummate strangeness and an oddball ferocity that never stoops to mere whimsy or the easy tour-de-force. Mark Ford is, quite simply, one of the most singular talents at work today--on either side of the Atlantic." --David Wojahn

About the Author

Mark Ford was born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1962. He has published three collections of poetry and a biography of the French writer Raymond Roussel. He has also translated Roussel's New Impressions of Africa, and is the editor of London: A History in Verse. He lives in London.