on Mark Ford's Essays

Making Strange

In Mark Ford’s fourth collection of essays, the subjects include pre-modern, modern and postmodern poets whose lives and works have been treated exhaustively by prior critics and biographers. But for those who have encountered his pieces in the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books (from which all but two of these entries are drawn), or who have enjoyed his LRB podcast with Seamus Perry, or who have admired his two critical biographies of Thomas Hardy, it will come as no surprise that Ford finds new approaches to well-examined figures including Housman, Eliot, Pound, Larkin, Gunn and Hughes. What continues to animate a reader is Ford’s ‘walking possession’ of the poets he considers.

The phrase is attributed to Ian Hamilton, and its legal provenance is apt: Ford discriminates nicely in his selection of quotes, and in his appraisals of individual poems or careers he renders justice without equivocation. His rebukes are relative sparseness: Ford’s persona throughout these essays is of an intrepid voyager who, while he may go in for a little stargazing, is not too besotted to explain his enthusiasms to a newcomer.

The book’s title comes from lines by Douglas Crase, the sole living poet to whom he devotes an essay:

                                                                               it is
You who are rising above them and you are not there.
Like a rocket in winter, I have been there to see you
Logged in as a guest among stars – only you,
Though you’re lovely to look at, expensive to own, ...