Mark Ford: Selected Poems
-
- $19.99
-
- $19.99
Publisher Description
An exuberant, versatile, and complex debut US collection from one of the United Kingdom’s most respected poets.
Mark Ford is widely recognized as one of the UK’s most innovative and exciting poets. This volume, culled from the work of three decades, reveals the full range of his experiments in language and form. Myth, history, and the everyday are entwined in complex, moving poems that deliver, in the words of John Ashbery, “waves and waves of refreshment.” Witty, eloquent, versatile, Ford charts the losses and gains of modern life in poetry of startling beauty and irrepressible humor.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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. Pulling work from three books of poetry Landlocked, Soft Sift, and Six Children and ending with a small selection of new poems, these selected poems are an exercise in play that energetically flaps against time, that "strange, gauze-like medium," and offers puzzling musings on human-invented remedies: "He cured... his own/ Hemorrhoids with a pigeon he cut open alive, then/ Applied to his feet, to which it drew down/ The vapors, while leeches set to work on his fundament." Poems that aren't adapted from Sappho, Natty Bumppo, or Catullus are casually cryptic, while others, written in effortless lilting of rhyme and textured sound, illustrate an anxiety about the modern world; the sectioning off of nature in man-made settings. One poem describes the reactions of a man who stumbles across a swimming pool filled with peanuts, while in another, "Cars, shops, and pedestrians merged/ Into one; I heard my name whispered fiercely, excitedly,/ In a voice I both dreaded and instantly recognized." This collection should make Ford's name a familiar one to more American readers.
