Synopses & Reviews
There are curved stories here, intrigues and quests whose exuberance of plot and sense of farcical immersion in the world of appearances is rendered with a light touch 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. Intrepid, cross-pollinated, oblique, Mark Ford has been called an American Philip Larkin and an English John Ashbery, but in fact he is like no one else, and only occasionally like himself.
Review
PRAISE FOR MARK FORD
"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
"Mark Ford ... has unerringly picked up what a sound engineer would call the 'room tone' of our eclectic contemporary frame of reference."--Helen Vendler
About the Author
Born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1962, Mark Ford attended Oxford and Harvard. Widely recognized as one of the best poets in England today, his work has been praised by critics and poets alike. Ford lives in London.