Böcker av Mark Ford

A Guest Among Stars collects recent essays by one of the most respected poet-critics of our time. Mark Ford discusses poets and their work, exploring context and settings behind some of the most prominent figures and works of poetry. The figures considered here range from Guillaume Apollinaire to Ezra Pound, from Derek Walcott to Joni Mitchell. The book's title is drawn from a poem by Douglas Crase, whose oeuvre is assessed in its final essay. An appendix present an enchanting selection of letters received by Ford from John Ashbery, whose work Ford has edited for the Library of America. These letters date from 1986, when Ford was at work on a PhD thesis on Ashbery, to the final missive Ford received in late 2017.

Because Thomas Hardy's poetry and fiction are so closely associated with Wessex, it is easy to forget that he was, in his own words, half a Londoner, moving between country and capital throughout his life. This self-division, Mark Ford says, can be traced not only in works explicitly set in London but in his most regionally circumscribed novels.

London has long been understood through the poetry it has inspired. Mark Ford has assembled the most capacious and wide-ranging anthology of poems about London to date, from Chaucer to Wordsworth to the present day, providing a chronological tour of urban life and of English literature. The volume includes an introductory essay by the poet.

This volume brings together sixteen essays on British, Irish and American poets from the late nineteenth century to the present day. It offers a series of entertaining and compelling readings of the lives and works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, W.B. Yeats, Edward Thomas, T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, James Schuyler, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Ted Hughes and Paul Muldoon among others. Arranged chronologically, the essays present a wide-ranging and sophisticated narrative that takes the reader from the first stirrings of modernism through to the dynamic experiments of the present day. A number of essays attend to particular artistic alignments. One explores the relationship between Wallace Stevens and the unjustly neglected English poet Nicholas Moore, another the close friendship between James Schuyler and the painter Fairfield Porter, while a third contends that the lyrics, music and career of Bob Dylan unwittingly illustrate many of the key tenets of the great nineteenth-century essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson.