Soft Sift: Poems [Hardcover]

Mark Ford (Author), John Ashbery (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2003

There are curved stories here, intrigues and quests whose exuberance of plot and sense of farcical immersion in the world of appearances is rendered with a light touch 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. Intrepid, cross-pollinated, oblique, Mark Ford has been called an American Philip Larkin and an English John Ashbery, but in fact he is like no one else, and only occasionally like himself.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Though U.K. sophisticates have been Ford fans for a decade, the London-based poet's first U.S. notice came with his recent critical volume Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams. He makes his American poetic debut in this slippery and smart volume of short poems. The people in Ford's poems move along misty, up-to-date paths through their cityscapes, musing on problems as recherch‚ as the nature of power, or as ordinary as the end of a romance: "Brinkmanship" imagines "moving/ Through time and air as if each mirrored the other," while the ironically titled "Twenty Twenty Vision" explains "my doom is never to forget/ My lost bearings." Some shorter poems mock the academy or explore the "ruthless, intricate currents" of travel and thought. Other poems offer warmer, less ironized pleasures: "Pinch me, pinch me, we hear ourselves murmur// over and over," a poem in long couplets concludes, "as fierce measures are fervently called for/ and taken, first inscribed in blood, then chiseled in stone." Admirers of John Ashbery-and especially of Ashbery's celebrated 1970s poems-will recognize the twists and turns, the avoidance of explicit story lines, and the coy self-presentations that mark much of Ford's new work.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

PRAISE FOR MARK FORD

"Ford's poetry is light and agile and sometimes sweet, but it also has a disconcerting way of turning sharp and naughty and even sinister."--John Ashbery

"Mark Ford ... has unerringly picked up what a sound engineer would call the 'room tone' of our eclectic contemporary frame of reference."--Helen Vendler

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 64 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (April 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 015100949X
• ISBN-13: 978-0151009497
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.6 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,027,503 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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