Introduction
Mark Ford (b. 1962 Nairobi, Kenya) is a British poet. He currently serves as the Head of the Department of English Language and Literature at University College London.
Life
He went to school in London, and attended Oxford University and, as a Kennedy Scholar, Harvard University. He studied for his doctorate at Oxford University on the poetry of John Ashbery, and has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American writing, including on Raymond Roussel. From 1991-1993 he was Visiting Lecturer at Kyoto University in Japan.
He is Professor of English in the Department of English Language and Literature at University College London.
He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and the London Review of Books.
Helen Vendler compared him with John Ashbery.
Works
Poetry
- Landlocked (Chatto & Windus, 1992; 1998)
- Soft Sift (Faber & Faber, 2001/Harcourt Brace, 2003).
- Six Children (Faber & Faber, 2011).
- Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2014)
Prose
- A Driftwood Altar (Waywiser Press, 2006).
- Mr and Mrs Stevens and Other Essays (Peter Lang, 2011).
Anthologies
- New Chatto Poets: Number Two (Chatto & Windus, 1989).
- London: A History in Verse (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012).
Biography
- Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams (Faber & Faber, 2001).
Translation
- New Impressions of Africa (Princeton University Press, 2011).
Criticism
- Something we have that they don't: British & American poetic relations since 1925 (University of Iowa Press, 2004).