Intriguing, Funny, Prophetic' ran the New York Review of Books headline to an admiring survey of the poetry of Mark Ford by the American critic Helen Vendler. The same words could describe Enter, Fleeing, the fourth collection of poems from one of the UK's most distinctive poets. The work gathered here displays Ford's power to amuse and startle, to move and disconcert. A number of short poems recreate moments from the poet's peripatetic childhood, while others dramatise more general states of fear and desire, of excitement and anxiety. As Vendler noted, Ford's recent work frequently addresses post-colonial issues arising from the collapse of the British Empire, as well as the paradoxes and information loops of today's globalised economy. Enter, Fleeing is Ford's most exhilarating and powerful volume to date.
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.
Soft Sift is Mark Ford's first collection since the widely praised Landlocked was published in 1992. Barbara Everett has remarked of his recent work: 'Mark Ford's poems are so cool that it's mystifying they aren't cold. But they aren't: they are friendly, touching and very funny. His work exhibits an enormous casual elegance of mind and style, producing work that is witty without pose, refined and subtle without evasiveness.' There are curved stories here, intrigues and quests whose exuberance of plot and sense of quizzical or farcical immersion in the world of appearances is rendered with a light tough 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. Mark Ford has been compared to an American Philip Larkin, or an English John Ashbery, but his poetry is in fact, as John Bayley has remarked 'wholly sui generis'.
Raymond Roussel, one of the most outlandishly compelling literary figures of modern times, died in mysterious circumstances at the age of fifty-six in 1933. The story Mark Ford tells about Roussel's life and work is at once captivating, heartbreaking, and almost beyond belief. Could even Proust or Nabokov have invented a character as strange and memorable as the exquisite dandy and graphomaniac this book brings to life? Roussel's poetry, novels, and plays influenced the work of many well-known writers and artists: Jean Cocteau found in him "genius in its pure state," while Salvador Dalí, who died with a copy of Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique on his bedside table, believed him to be one of France's greatest writers ever. Edmond Rostand, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Michel Foucault, and Alain Robbe-Grillet all testified to the power of his unique imagination. By any standards, Roussel led an extraordinary life. Tremendously wealthy, he took two world tours during which he hardly left his hotel rooms. He never wore his clothes more than twice, and generally avoided conversation because he dreaded that it might turn morbid. Ford, himself a poet, traces the evolution of Roussel's bizarre compositional methods and describes the idiosyncrasies of a life structured as obsessively as Roussel structured his writing.
For fans of professional football who thought they had read everything about the history of the game, Mark L. Ford breaks new ground with this account of the NFL preseason. Described as “test labs” by Ford, preseason games are a time for trying out new strategies, considering future rule changes, and implementing television coverage innovations. For thousands of players who vie for a spot in the league every summer, the preseason is also the defining moment where careers can be made or broken. A History of NFL Preseason and Exhibition Games: 1986 to 2013 is one of two books by Ford on professional football’s preseason. Along with its companion volume—which covers 1960 to 1985—these resources provide information on every NFL and AFL preseason game played since the AFL was launched in 1960. All the interesting events and people that were part of these summer battles are detailed, as well as the first outings for new teams, new rules, and new stars. Ford also includes amusing anecdotes and mishaps, such as a last-minute defeat in 2000 when a player tackled his own teammate. Along the way, Ford recounts key off-season developments that would transform professional football from a modest enterprise into a global monopoly with annual revenues and assets worth billions. A History of NFL Preseason and Exhibition Games is a unique and important reference for pro football fans and cultural historians alike.
Body language and Behavioral Profiling" is a timely book on the vital roles of nonverbal communications and people reading in our everyday lives. We all use body language to communicate our innermost feelings, thoughts, and attitudes along with spoken words. Knowing the hints, clues, signals, and signs that people use in business and social settings helps people to interpret behavioral motives, and enables them to rapidly organize information for quick decisions that may be consequential. In addition, facial expressions, posture, dress attire, and gestures that people use all infer future behavior patterns. In this book, body language signals and signs are broken down into understandable topics backed by authoritative sources. Practical pointers help readers to adopt better image and self-presentation skills. The social science tools that are covered will help readers to "get" the motives and behavior of others, while improving their own intercommunications, which helps people make more informed decisions, meet personal goals, and more fully protect themselves.
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.
Port Aransas, known colloquially as Port A, is on Mustang Island, one of the Texas barrier islands. This community grew from the seed of El Mar Rancho, the homestead an Englishman established for his family in 1855the name Port Aransas was adopted in 1910. The evolution of Port A includes the guiding of sport fishermen to the hard-fighting tarpon fish, bouncing back from five major hurricanes, and the development of tourism that has made the town a nationally sought out destination. Despite all of the changes that have visited Port Aransas, the pace there still conforms to island time. Indeed, a number of images in this book were selected for how they portray that unique quality of life.
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