Enter, Fleeing

'Intriguing, Funny, Prophetic' ran the New York Review of Books headline to an admiring survey of the poetry of Mark Ford by the American critic Helen Vendler. The same words could describe Enter, Fleeing, the fourth collection of poems from one of the UK's most distinctive poets. The work gathered here displays Ford's power to amuse and startle, to move and disconcert. A number of short poems recreate moments from the poet's peripatetic childhood, while others dramatise more general states of fear and desire, of excitement and anxiety. As Vendler noted, Ford's recent work frequently addresses post-colonial issues arising from the collapse of the British Empire, as well as the paradoxes and information loops of today's globalised economy. Enter, Fleeing is Ford's most exhilarating and powerful volume to date.

Mark Ford was born in 1962 in Nairobi, Kenya. He grew up in a number of countries, including Nigeria, America, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong and Bahrain. He has written four collections of poetry: Landlocked (1992), Soft Sift (2001), Six Children (2011), and Enter, Fleeing (2018). He is also the author of Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams (2000), the first English-language biography of the French poet, playwright and novelist Raymond Roussel (1877-1933). His translation of Roussel's Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique for a parallel text edition published in 2011 was a runner-up for that year's PEN Translation Awards. Mark Ford's other publications include the anthology London: A History in Verse (2012), Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner (2016), and three collections of essays: A Driftwood Altar (2005), Mr and Mrs Stevens and Other Essays (2011), and This Dialogue of One: Essays on Poets from John Donne to Joan Murray (2014), which was awarded the Poetry Foundation's 2015 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books.