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.
