Exploring the lives and influences of notable poets, this collection of essays delves into the contexts surrounding their works, featuring figures like Apollinaire, Pound, Walcott, and Mitchell. The final essay reflects on Douglas Crase, while an appendix showcases a captivating selection of letters from John Ashbery, spanning over three decades of correspondence with Ford. This insightful examination highlights the interconnectedness of poetry and personal relationships, revealing the depth of Ford's engagement with the literary world.
Woman Much Missed is the first book-length study of the many poems that Thomas
Hardy composed in the wake of the death of his first wife Emma. It shows how
Emma's writings and experiences were fundamental to Hardy's evolution into
both a best-selling novelist and into one of the greatest poets of the
twentieth century
Bathsheba Everdene is young, proud, and beautiful. She is an independent woman and can marry any man she chooses - if she chooses. In fact, she likes her independence, and she likes fighting her own battles in a man's world. But it is never wise to ignore the power of love.
Raymond Roussel, one of the most outlandishly compelling literary figures of modern times, died in mysterious circumstances at the age of fifty-six in 1933. The story Mark Ford tells about Roussel's life and work is at once captivating, heartbreaking, and almost beyond belief. Could even Proust or Nabokov have invented a character as strange and memorable as the exquisite dandy and graphomaniac this book brings to life?Roussel's poetry, novels, and plays influenced the work of many well-known writers and artists: Jean Cocteau found in him "genius in its pure state," while Salvador Dalí, who died with a copy of Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique on his bedside table, believed him to be one of France's greatest writers ever. Edmond Rostand, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Michel Foucault, and Alain Robbe-Grillet all testified to the power of his unique imagination.By any standards, Roussel led an extraordinary life. Tremendously wealthy, he took two world tours during which he hardly left his hotel rooms. He never wore his clothes more than twice, and generally avoided conversation because he dreaded that it might turn morbid. Ford, himself a poet, traces the evolution of Roussel's bizarre compositional methods and describes the idiosyncrasies of a life structured as obsessively as Roussel structured his writing.
