Search results for ""Author Mark Ford""

'Though unmarried I have had six children,' Walt Whitman claimed in a letter late in his life. The title poem of Mark Ford's third collection imagines the great poet's getting of these mysterious children, of whom no historical trace has ever emerged. Conception and extinction dominate this extraordinary new volume from one of the country's most exciting poets; it includes a lament for the passing of the passenger pigeon, a sestina on the Mau Mau insurrection in Kenya (where the poet was born), a chance encounter with a seventy-year-old Hart Crane in Greenwich Village, an elegy for Mick Imlah (whose Selected Poems Ford has edited for Faber), and a moving tribute to that weirdest of religious sects, the Münster Anabaptists. Six Children is Ford's most formally varied and historically wide-ranging volume. It is sure to win many new admirers for a poet whose work has been championed by such as Helen Vendler, John Bayley, Barbara Everett, and John Ashbery.

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Called “the flour of Cities all,” London has long been understood through the poetry it has inspired. Now poet Mark Ford has assembled the most capacious and wide-ranging anthology of poems about London to date, from Chaucer to Wordsworth to the present day, providing a chronological tour of urban life and of English literature. Nearly all of the major poets of British literature have left some poetic record of London: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, and T. S. Eliot. Ford goes well beyond these figures, however, to gather significant verse of all kinds, from Jacobean city comedies to nursery rhymes, from topical satire to anonymous ballads. The result is a cultural history of the city in verse, one that represents all classes of London’s population over some seven centuries, mingling the high and low, the elegant and the salacious, the courtly and the street smart. Many of the poems respond to large events in the city’s history—the beheading of Charles I, the Great Fire, the Blitz—but the majority reflect the quieter routines and anxieties of everyday life through the centuries.Ford’s selections are arranged chronologically, thus preserving a sense of the strata of the capital’s history. An introductory essay by the poet explores in detail the cultural, political, and aesthetic significance of the verse inspired by this great city. The result is a volume as rich and vibrant and diverse as London itself.

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Exhilarating fourth collection of poems from the 'intriguing, funny, prophetic' man of letters Mark Ford.

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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.

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Woman Much Missed is the first book-length study of the many poems (over 150) that Thomas Hardy composed in the wake of the death of his first wife Emma in November of 1912. Mark Ford uses these poems to develop a narrative of their four-year courtship on the remote and romantic coast of Cornwall where they met, and then follows Thomas's poetic recreation of the slow degeneration of their marriage and their embittered final decade. Ford shows how Emma's writings and experiences during this time were fundamental to Thomas's evolution into both a best-selling novelist and into one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. Although for over a decade the marriage between Thomas and Emma had been troubled, and indeed Emma spent much time during her final years secluded in her attic rooms above his study, her death stimulated him to write some of the greatest elegies in English. Twenty-one of these, including masterpieces such as 'The Voice' (which opens 'Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me') and 'After a Journey' were collected in 'Poems of 1912-13'. While these have received much attention and are often read by school pupils and university students alike, his numerous other poems about Emma have only rarely been discussed. Ford corrects this oversight, providing accessible and insightful readings from a poet's perspective.

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Ford is editing the UK edition of the Best American Poetry series and we can expect attention and support from them here Ford is a very active critic and both well-known and well-respected in both the UK and the US with regular reviews in the TLS and London Review of Books Ford's work has appeared in the US in The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Paris Review, Bookforum, and The New Republic. Ford is well known here for having edited O'Hara's selected poems Ford's work has been reviewed enthusiastically in the New York Times in the past Ford's is constantly reinventing himself as a poet, giving the collection a versatility and variety that's exciting Ford says he writes to delight the reader (Vendler has said she reads him "with instant joy") and it's that kind of energy that drives his work and makes it so appealing Ford first came to poetry via the American greats—Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Williams, Eliot, Pound, Bishop, Ginsberg—and those influences are alive in his work today The book includes a section of new poems as well, for those US readers familiar with his work

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Because Thomas Hardy is so closely associated with the rural Wessex of his novels, stories, and poems, it is easy to forget that he was, in his own words, half a Londoner. Focusing on the formative five years in his early twenties when Hardy lived in the city, but also on his subsequent movement back and forth between Dorset and the capital, Mark Ford shows that the Dorset-London axis is critical to an understanding of his identity as a man and his achievement as a writer.Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner presents a detailed account of Hardy’s London experiences, from his arrival as a shy, impressionable youth, to his embrace of radical views, to his lionization by upper-class hostesses eager to fête the creator of Tess. Drawing on Hardy’s poems, letters, fiction, and autobiography, it offers a subtle, moving exploration of the author’s complex relationship with the metropolis and those he met or observed there: publishers, fellow authors, street-walkers, benighted lovers, and the aristocratic women who adored his writing but spurned his romantic advances.The young Hardy’s oscillations between the routines and concerns of Dorset’s Higher Bockhampton and the excitements and dangers of London were crucial to his profound sense of being torn between mutually dependent but often mutually uncomprehending worlds. This fundamental self-division, Ford argues, can be traced not only in the poetry and fiction explicitly set in London but in novels as regionally circumscribed as Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

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Poet, novelist, playwright, and chess enthusiast, Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) was one of the French belle poque's most compelling literary figures. During his lifetime, Roussel's work was vociferously championed by the surrealists, but never achieved the widespread acclaim for which he yearned. New Impressions of Africa is undoubtedly Roussel's most extraordinary work. Since its publication in 1932, this weird and wonderful poem has slowly gained cult status, and its admirers have included Salvador Dali--who dubbed it the most "ungraspably poetic" work of the era--Andr Breton, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, Michel Foucault, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery. Roussel began writing New Impressions of Africa in 1915 while serving in the French Army during the First World War and it took him seventeen years to complete. "It is hard to believe the immense amount of time composition of this kind of verse requires," he later commented. Mysterious, unnerving, hilarious, haunting, both rigorously logical and dizzyingly sublime, it is truly one of the hidden masterpieces of twentieth-century modernism. This bilingual edition of New Impressions of Africa presents the original French text and the English poet Mark Ford's lucid, idiomatic translation on facing pages. It also includes an introduction outlining the poem's peculiar structure and evolution, notes explaining its literary and historical references, and the fifty-nine illustrations anonymously commissioned by Roussel, via a detective agency, from Henri-A. Zo.

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In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets of our literature. Allen Ginsberg (1926-97) was born in Newark, New Jersey, to a poet-teacher father and Russian emigre mother. Along with his friend Jack Kerouac, he attended Columbia University, but was initially expelled for writings obscenities on his dormitory window before returning to complete his graduation in 1948. When "Howl and Other Poems" was impounded by San Francisco customs in 1956, the subsequent trial for obscenity catapulted Ginsberg and his publisher City Lights to national fame and helped to define the Beat Generation. His "Collected Poems: 1947-1997" appeared in 2006.

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MacArthur “genius” Douglas Crase is best known for his invocations and revisions of Whitmanian transcendentalism. Out of print since 1987, his book The Revisionist has still been enough in some opinions to establish him as one of the most important poets of his generation; on its strength, says the Oxford Book of American Poetry, "rests a formidable underground reputation." Now, by combining The Revisionist with Crase's chapbook The Astropastorals in a new collection, Nightboat Books presents his formidable reputation to a wider public for the first time in thirty-two years.

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A witty, intricately-plotted exploration of a sudden fall from grace, the Penguin Classics edition of Wilkie Collins's No Name is edited with an introduction and notes by Mark Ford.Magdalen and her sister Norah, beloved daughters of Mr and Mrs Vanstone, find themselves the victims of a catastrophic oversight. Their father has neglected to change his will, and when the girls are suddenly orphaned, their inheritance goes to their uncle. Now penniless, the conventional Norah takes up a position as a governess, but the defiant and tempestuous Magdalen cannot accept the loss of what is rightfully hers and decides to do whatever she can to win it back. With the help of cunning Captain Wragge, she concocts a scheme that involves disguise, deceit and astonishing self-transformation. In this compelling, labyrinthine story Wilkie Collins brilliantly demonstrates the gap between justice and the law, and in the subversive Magdalen he portrays one of the most exhilarating heroines of Victorian fiction.In his introduction Mark Ford examines themes of identity and illegitimacy within Victorian society and compares No Name to Collins's more 'sensational' fiction. This edition also includes notes and a bibliography.Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was born in London in 1824, the eldest son of the landscape painter William Collins. In 1846 he was entered to read for the bar at Lincoln's Inn, where he gained the knowledge that was to give him much of the material for his writing. From the early 1850s he was a friend of Charles Dickens, who produced and acted in two melodramas written by Collins, The Lighthouse and The Frozen Deep. Of his novels, Collins is best remembered for The Woman in White (1859), No Name (1862), Armadale (1866) and The Moonstone (1868).If you enjoyed No Name, you might like Anthony Trollope's Can You Forgive Her?, also available in Penguin Classics.

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After his spectacular early career, in which he became one of the best-loved and most controversial poets of his time, and his radical and productive middle years, John Ashbery continued effortlessly finding new directions in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, writing playfully, inventively. His language is exquisitely attuned to mundane reality, transforming it. Here in a single, substantial, authoritative, and helpfully annotated volume are seven complete books from this crucial period, starting with Flow Chart (1991), a tour de force that shows Ashbery's mastery of `the entire orchestral potential of the English language,' as Helen Vendler put it. It complements Ashbery's earlier Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, offering a vision of the collective `dream of everyday life that was our / beginning, and where we still live, out in the open, under clouds stacked up in a holding pattern / like pictures in a nineteenth-century museum.' The poems range across Ashbery's varied interests and obsessions - opera, film noir, French poetry, the visual arts. Everywhere is his boundless inventiveness, his pitch-perfect ear for American speech, his exuberant erudition. The book ends with twenty-six uncollected poems, among them `Hoboken', a collage that pillages Roget's Thesaurus, and much else.

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The Best British Poetry 2014 presents the finest and most engaging poems found in literary magazines and webzines over the past year. The material gathered represents the rich variety of current UK poetry. Each poem is accompanied by a note by the poet explaining the inspiration for the poem.

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Far From the Madding Crowd was the first of Hardy’s novels to give the name of Wessex to the landscape of south-west England and is set against the backdrop of the unchanging natural cycle of the year. The story both upholds and questions rural values with a startlingly modern sensibility.Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition features original illustrations by Helen Allingham and an introduction by Professor Mark Ford.Gabriel Oak is only one of three suitors for the hand of the beautiful and spirited Bathsheba Everdene. He must compete with the dashing young soldier Sergeant Troy and respectable, middle-aged Farmer Boldwood. And while their fates depend upon the choice Bathsheba makes, she discovers the terrible consequences of an inconstant heart.

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'A revelation ... as well as being sympathetic to the plight of children, it is hilarious' A. N. WilsonThe hero of Dickens's flamboyantly exuberant novel, Nicholas Nickleby, is left penniless after his father's death and forced to make his own way in the world. His adventures give Dickens the opportunity to portray an extraordinary gallery of rogues and eccentrics: Wackford Squeers, the tyrannical headmaster of Dotheboys Hall; the tragic orphan Smike, rescued by Nicholas; and the gloriously theatrical Mr and Mrs Crummle and their daughter, the 'infant phenomenon'. Nicholas Nickleby is characterized by Dickens's outrage at social injustice, but it also reveals his comic genius at its most unerring.Edited with an Introduction by Mark Ford

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Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi is one of the leading African poets writing in Arabic today. Famous in his native Sudan, the vivid imagery of his searing, lyric poems create the world afresh in their yearning for transcendence. In 2005 Saddiq’s poems were first translated into English by the Poetry Translation Centre for their first World Poets’ Tour. Since then he has received a rapturous reception from UK audiences. In 2010 a party was organised for him at London's Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology which holds a significant collection of ancient Sudanese artefacts. As a result of the success of this event (and earlier visits to the Petrie in 2005 and 2006), he was able to work in the Petrie Museum as their poet in residence during the summer of 2012. This led to a new book of poems, He Tells Tales of Meroe: Poems for the Petrie Museum (Poetry Translation Centre/Petrie Museum, 2015), which was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award. Born in Omdurman Khartoum in 1969, Saddiq has published four volumes of poetry, including his Collected Poems in 2010. From 2006 he was the cultural editor of Al-Sudani newspaper until he was forced into exile in 2012. He was granted asylum in the UK and now lives in London. Arabic-English bilingual edition

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