Book description
'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.
Mark Ford was born in 1962. He has published two previous
collections of poetry, Landlocked (Chatto & Windus, 1992) and Soft
Sift (Faber, 2001). He is also the author of a critical biography of
Raymond Roussel (Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams (Faber,
2000), and a collection of essays, A Driftwood Altar (Waywiser Press,
2005). A second volume of critical pieces, Mr and Mrs Stevens and
Other Essays, will be published in May of 2011, as will his
translation of Raymond Roussel's Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique. He
teaches in the English Department at University College London.
