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“... Christmas, Grandad came down from the mountains, and we had to go fishing, on the ornamental lake. The ornery mental lake, that’s what I call it. ‘Do I have to, Pop? It’s just animal death!’ Fishing, fishing, till everything is killed. ‘How’s the love-life?’ Grandad asked. My father was having trouble, some affair that was going wrong ...”

“... they have done at least one of the things poetry is thought to do: hold a mirror up to emotion. Mark Ford is a mirror of uncanny exactness, and what he mirrors ranges from the inarticulate wrath above to bathetic pitfalls and pratfalls: Others – I am not the first – have found themselves standing on a seemingly solid patch of cliff that suddenly ...”

“... and the immovable.’I was often put in mind of ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ while reading Mark Ford’s study of Thomas Hardy. Ford doesn’t mention it (though he does refer to Baudelaire’s flaneurial poems), perhaps because that manifesto is too obvious, or too obviously theoretical: he prefers to build his ...”

“... The excitable, exuberant surface of Mark Ford’s poems makes them instantly attractive. They speak with a bewildered urgency: See, no hands! she cried Sailing down the turnpike, And flapped her arms like a pigeon, And from the backseat Solomon, her spaniel, answered her By woofing ever more madly at each passing car! Here, in the title poem, the crucial analogy with travel is at its most explicit; there’s the sense in both cases of simultaneous thrill and disorientation; the imagery of these poems unsettles and excites through unfamiliar angles of perception and exotic juxtapositions ...”

“... the re-enactments. In an informative introduction to his translation of Impressions d’Afrique, Mark Polizzotti describes in some detail his effort to arrive at an English comparable to Roussel’s near mathematically concise French. The author of a biography of Breton, a short book on Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, and a translator of Echenoz, among ...”

“... is the nearest that Roussel’s writing ever comes to entering the inner world of another person.) Mark Ford is alive to the idiosyncratic nature of Roussel’s ‘self-evident uniqueness’ and ‘unassailable self-referentiality’, just as he is aware of the dangers of seeking to contextualise or even to ‘understand’ Roussel’s work, rendering it ...”

“... the wrongs that can’t be righted.’ Emma’s death is one such wrong, and in Woman Much Missed Mark Ford weaves together the life and poetry without reducing one to the other and offers a fine-grained analysis of their relationship and its bearing on Hardy’s work. Moving from his depictions of Emma’s life before they met to their courtship and ...”

“... but some of the poems it contains are among the best he has written.Listen to Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss Seamus Heaney in their Close Readings series on the LRB ...”

“... were being shipped to the archive at Smith College where they are now held. In 2014, an inquiry by Mark Ford, who’d written on Murray for Poetry, prompted the trunk’s rediscovery (as Farnoosh Fathi tells us in her introduction, it had a dent in its side consistent with having fallen off the back of a lorry). This new book, Drafts, Fragments and Poems ...”

“... Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises … And that’s true too.Listen to Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss Seamus Heaney in their Close Readings series on the LRB ...”

“... slowly in the branches.The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down. Listen to Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss Wallace Stevens on the LRB ...”

“... based English school if you were to have something substantial to examine, this being seen as the mark of a kosher academic subject; but since much of the influential work in this area was German, this also meant throwing in your hand with a bunch of Teutonic barbarians who, come 1914, were marauding at the gate in a more than merely intellectual sense. The ...”

“... for all the fiddle of these essays, make a very convincing Nero.Listen to Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss Seamus Heaney in their Close Readings series on the LRB ...”

“... which is threatened – all this is signified by their language.Listen to Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss Seamus Heaney in their Close Readings series on the LRB ...”

“... of the translation lies in less conspicuous areas. Line lengths vary around the twelve syllable mark, and usually each line contains five main stresses; but every so often Heaney introduces a straight pentameter line. Often these deliberately reverberate with the energy of Milton or of Dryden. So the spirits of the Greeks retreat when they see Aeneas ...”