Selected Poems charts Mark Ford's growing complexity as a writer and his mastery and use of form. John Ashbery calls Ford's work "refreshing" and it's that exuberance and goodwill that animates the poems, giving them their spontaneity and leavening the grim with comic elan and joy. Myth, history, and the everyday are all at play in this wonderfully diverse collection.

Invisible Assets:

After he threw he through a
plate glass window, nature seemed that much closer.

Even the dastardly division in society
might be healed by a first-rate glazier.

Of course, on Sundays families still picnicked
boldly on the village green, and afterwards

marveled at the blacksmith's glowing forge-
how strong they all were in those days!

And yet how small! Even a man only six foot tall
was then esteemed a veritable giant.

Surely the current furor over architecture
would have evoked from them only pitying smiles.

Meanwhile the market for landscapes has never
been firmer. This view, for instance, includes

seven counties, and a bull charging around in its paddock.

Mark Ford was born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1962. He has published three collections of poetry and a biography of the French writer Raymond Roussel and is the editor of Frank O'Hara's Selected Poems. He has also translated Roussel's New Impressions of Africa and is the editor of London: A History in Verse. He lives in London, England.