Ian Gregson

The excitable, exuberant surface of Mark Ford’s poems makes them instantly attractive. They speak with a bewildered urgency:

He saw the photo on the Sunday, started writing on the Monday

how the dead Iraqi spoke like Palinurus or that bloke

in ‘Strange Meeting’: you’ll have read before about the talking dead –

no problem then for this charred head, except for how and what it said,

for when it leant into his mike it sounded like a pissed-off tyke,

it sounded like his loiner dad, someone a...