Soft Sift Poems |
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Author:
| Ford, Mark |
Foreword by:
| Ashbery, John |
ISBN: | 978-0-15-100949-7 |
Publication Date: | Apr 2003 |
Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
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Book Format: | Hardback |
List Price: | USD $23.00 |
Book Description:
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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...
More DescriptionThere 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.