Mark Ford

'When I'm in power I will pursue landlords /across the country. Right now, life / has me boxed in'.

There are times when it seems everything is trying to box in the speaker in Landlocked (1992): relationships, politics, culture, as well as, of course, life itself. Yet what intrigues one most about Ford's debut is its relentless examination of these confines. Although Ford has much in common with the New York Poets, and shares their taste for sarcasm and elegance (as well as exclamation marks), there is no arrogant over-reliance on the 'I'. Instead, he mediates their American breeziness with a linguistic probing that endows his lines with a distinctly English feel:

'Until one day speech
Is merely syntax, and one's head
Is so full of stratagems
The tea freezes solid in its pot;'

Despite Ford's humorous stabs at the academic establishment ('Language is life (God help us) / it's more like a vinegar eye-bath to me.'), these poems deal with the difficulty of constructing a coherent narrative, in that they represent as engaged and persuasive a defence of the post-modern experiment as can be found in contemporary poetry. 'Daily' is a case in point: 'Turn out the light – some story / is breaking, crumbling, collapsing / under the intolerable weight of fresh evidence'. It is these and other qualities which Ian Gregson, in his review of Landlocked, called 'instantly attractive', qualities that Ford was to sharpen with his second collection, Soft Sift (2001). In her review of the volume, Helen Vendler praised Ford as 'a mirror of uncanny exactness' – where subdued wrath finds a chilling but evocative coolness that is quite simply difficult to resist – as in 'Sheep's Head Gully':

'After years on the trail I could barely
Distinguish friend from enemy: they lay
Together like pebbles, immune to the seasons,
While I tramped about collecting old remnants, ingesting
Their knowledge of knowledge.'

Considering how often Ford deals with knowledge (and its limitations), his ability to turn idioms on their head is altogether welcome – as in these lines from 'You Must': 'every hopeful / ends up learning never to answer questions posed in letters, and how to turn the other cheek, or sharply one one's heel'. Soft Sift sees Ford engage with familiar themes: newspapers, urbane solitude, the lure of cash, of sex, the hilarity of crossed cultural wires ('Early to Bed, Early to Rise') – all interspersed with intense, almost epigrammatic moments of self-reflection: 'I hate to lie, but unfortunately have come to loathe / the insatiable, unsheathed claws of truth;' ('One Figures'). Other stand outs from the collection include 'Jack Rabbit' and 'Hooked'.

Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams (2000), is Ford's first book of prose and to date the only full-length account of Roussel in English. It is a bizarre but wholly captivating analysis of one of the twentieth century's most eccentric literary minds. Though primarily a study of Roussel's writings, the book involves numerous entertaining episodes from the author's life - extravagant menus, bathroom facilities for pet chihuahuas and Roussel's luxurious maison roulante, or villa on wheels, with which he toured the Continent. Yet it is the economy of Roussel's life and intellect which Ford is drawn to. His explanation for his interest in Roussel, in an essay dated 1997, illuminates his later full-length effort: 'I felt I was trespassing into the heart of some unfathomable French mystery, the sort not even the French have time for', he writes. What interests him is Roussel's 'delirium of excess' and the consequences it had on his life:

Roussel was to be made gradually aware over the next decade that the money he spent trying to reach an audience large enough to satisfy the promise of his early visions, was precisely that money which had hitherto insulated him from the world, and so made his art possible. The logic of this paradox required him to bankrupt himself - publishing, staging and advertising works that no one wanted - while at least subliminally aware all along that his approaching insolvency would signal the end of his literary and physical life.

Roussel makes a further appearance in A Driftwood Altar (2005), Ford's first collection of essays, which continues to demonstrate Ford's fascination with writers in risk of desuetude. A Driftwood Altar features a range of remarkable portraits; from the Italian futurist Marinetti, the self-described 'caffeine of Europe', to the strange undersides of more established names, such as the piece on James Schuyler's obsession with Englishness. Other essays included are on Mina Loy, Georges Perec, Thomas Lovell Beddoes (a Ford favourite) and Allen Ginsberg. A testament to Ford's prolific journalism for the London Review of Books, New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, A Driftwood Altar, as James Wood put it: 'is a remarkable achievement; an alternative history of Modernism.' A second volume of essays is forthcoming from Peter Lang.

Ford's third collection of poetry, Six Children (2011), not only lives up to its predecessors, but continues to display Ford's trademark precision as well as his formal inventiveness. Six Children is still as comic and acerbic, but has a calmer, more measured feel than Soft Sift. Notable examples include the beguiling prose poem 'The Death of Hart Crane', 'Ravished', a tribute for the poet Mick Imlah (1957-2009), and 'The Death of Petronius', a brilliant translation from Tacitus:

'While many
Doomed like Petronius compose death-bed testaments that shamelessly flatter
Whoever happens to be in power, his will contained a list
Of all the Emperor’s most peculiar erotic tastes and extravagant
Sexual experiments, and the names of his partners
In crime, both men and women, willing and unwilling. He sent this
Under seal to Nero, then broke his signet-ring: it, at least,
Would be innocent of the blood of others.'

Also forthcoming is a translation of Roussel's Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique (2011), commissioned by Princeton University Press for their 'Facing Pages' series. 

Nouvelles Impressions, Roussel's final major work, finds Ford revisiting the subject of The Republic of Dreams, and skilfully drawing poetry out of Roussel's complexly layered French alexandrines: 'fever makes us grow, even adults, everyone knows this — / By degrees he turns into a hearty convalescent / Driven by pangs of hunger to eat like a hundred'.

A popular lecturer at University College London, where he has taught since the mid 1990s, Ford's ample abilities have ensured that every appearance is eagerly awaited. With three anticipated volumes awaiting publication, one wonders what new projects the next decade will usher.

André Naffis Sahely, 2010.