Mark Ford: Selected Poems
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
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.
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.
