Mark Ford

Starred review from April 28, 2014
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.