Six Children

'Though unmarried I have had six children,' Walt Whitman claimed in a letter late in his life. The title poem of Mark Ford's third collection imagines the great poet's getting of these mysterious children, of whom no historical trace has ever emerged. Conception and extinction dominate this extraordinary new volume from one of the country's most exciting poets; it includes a lament for the passing of the passenger pigeon, a sestina on the Mau Mau insurrection in Kenya (where the poet was born), a chance encounter with a seventy-year-old Hart Crane in Greenwich Village, an elegy for Mick Imlah (whose Selected Poems Ford edited for Faber), and a moving tribute to that weirdest of religious sects, the Munster Anabaptists.

Six Children is Ford's most formally varied and historically wide-ranging volume. It is sure to win many new admirers for a poet whose work has been championed by such as Helen Vendler, John Bayley, Barbara Everett, and John Ashbery.

Mark Ford was born in 1962. He has published two previous collections of poetry, Landlocked and Soft Sift. He is also the author of a critical biography of Raymond Roussel: Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams, and a collection of essays, A Driftwood Altar. A second volume of critical pieces, Mr and Mrs Stevens and Other Essays, will be published in the middle of 2011, as will his translation of Raymond Roussel's Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique. He teaches in the English Department at University College London.

'Though unmarried I have had six children,' Walt Whitman claimed in a letter late in his life. The title poem of Mark Ford's third collection imagines the great poet's getting of these mysterious children, of whom no historical trace has ever emerged. Conception and extinction dominate this extraordinary new volume from one of the country's most exciting poets; it includes a lament for the passing of the passenger pigeon, a sestina on the Mau Mau insurrection in Kenya (where the poet was born), a chance encounter with a seventy-year-old Hart Crane in Greenwich Village, an elegy for Mick Imlah (whose Selected Poems Ford edited for Faber), and a moving tribute to that weirdest of religious sects, the Munster Anabaptists. Six Children is Ford's most formally varied and historically wide-ranging volume. It is sure to win many new admirers for a poet whose work has been championed by such as Helen Vendler, John Bayley, Barbara Everett, and John Ashbery.

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