Mark Ford

Mark Ford teaches English at UCL and presents the LRB podcast series Close Readings with Seamus Perry. Woman Much Missed: Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy, and Poetry was published last year.

Letter

Voltaire’s Skull

8 November 2018

Fredric Jameson, in his illuminating piece on Karl Ove Knausgaard, asks us to ‘recall the story by Raymond Roussel of his discovery, in a dusty provincial museum, under glass, of the skull of Voltaire as a child’ (LRB, 8 November). A story concerning Voltaire features, along with the reanimated skull of the great orator Danton, in Chapter 3 of Roussel’s Locus Solus (1914), and Voltaire is prominent...

If Hardy was half a modern Londoner, the other half had a weakness for the pastoral-oracular. The two halves changed shape, feeding and modifying each other.

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Earthworm on Zither: Raymond Roussel

Paul Grimstad, 26 April 2012

‘I have travelled a great deal,’ Raymond Roussel wrote towards the end of his life, ‘but from all these travels I never took anything for my books.’ It’s an odd...

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Fronds and Tenrils: Mark Ford

Helen Vendler, 29 November 2001

Suppose, having been betrayed – ‘hooked/then thrown back’ – you decide to let your instant reflex, a desire for revenge, cool off overnight; then suppose you wake up the...

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In the Anti-World: Raymond Roussel

Nicholas Jenkins, 6 September 2001

In 1924 the Surrealist Benjamin Péret was eager, like many artists then and since, to relate his own interests to the works of the rich, bizarre and innovative French poet, novelist and...

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Eternal Feminine

Ian Gregson, 7 January 1993

The excitable, exuberant surface of Mark Ford’s poems makes them instantly attractive. They speak with a bewildered urgency: See, no hands! she cried Sailing down the turnpike, And flapped...

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