A Guest Among Stars

A Guest Among Stars collects recent essays by one of the most respected poet-critics of our time. Mark Ford discusses poets and their work, exploring context and settings behind some of the most prominent figures and works of poetry. The figures considered here range from Guillaume Apollinaire to Ezra Pound, from Derek Walcott to Joni Mitchell. The book’s title is drawn from a poem by Douglas Crase, whose oeuvre is assessed in its final essay. An appendix present an enchanting selection of letters received by Ford from John Ashbery, whose work Ford has edited for the Library of America. These letters date from 1986, when Ford was at work on a PhD thesis on Ashbery, to the final missive Ford received in late 2017.

Mark Ford is the author of four collections of poetry: Landlocked (Chatto & Windus,1992), Soft Sift (Faber & Faber, 2001), Six Children (Faber &Faber, 2011), and Enter, Fleeing (Faber & Faber, 2018). He has also published two monographs, Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams (Faber & Faber, 2000) and Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner (Harvard University Press, 2016), and is the editor of the anthology London: A History in Verse (Harvard University Press, 2012). His most recent collection of essays, This Dialogue of One: Essays on Poets from John Donne to Joan Murray (Eyewear, 2014), was awarded the Poetry Foundation’s 2015 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. A monograph entitled Woman Much Missed: Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy, and Poetry will be published by Oxford University Press in July. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. A selection of his poetry is available at http: //www.poetryarchive.org/poet/mark-ford; and an ongoing series of podcasts made with Seamus Perry about twentieth-century poets (including one on John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara) is available on the London Review of Books website https: //www.lrb.co.uk He is on a shortlist of four applicants to be the next Oxford Professor of Poetry (the result will be announced in June).