Selected Poems charts Mark Ford's growing complexity as a writer and his mastery and use of form. John Ashbery calls Ford's work “refreshing” and it's that exuberance and goodwill that animates the poems, giving them their spontaneity and leavening the grim with comic élan and joy. Myth, history, and the everyday are all at play in this wonderfully diverse collection.

Invisible Assets:

After he threw he through aplate glass window, nature seemed that much closer.
Even the dastardly division in societymight be healed by a first-rate glazier.
Of course, on Sundays families still picnickedboldly on the village green, and afterwards
marveled at the blacksmith's glowing forge—how strong they all were in those days!
And yet how small! Even a man only six foot tallwas then esteemed a veritable giant.
Surely the current furor over architecturewould have evoked from them only pitying smiles.
Meanwhile the market for landscapes has neverbeen firmer. This view, for instance, includes

seven counties, and a bull charging around in its paddock.

Mark Ford was born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1962. He has published three collections of poetry and a biography of the French writer Raymond Roussel and is the editor of Frank O'Hara's Selected Poems. He has also translated Roussel's New Impressions of Africa and is the editor of London: A History in Verse. He lives in London, England.