Enter, Fleeing

'Intriguing, Funny, Prophetic' ran the New York Review of Books headline to an admiring survey of the poetry of Mark Ford by the American critic Helen Vendler. The same words could describe Enter, Fleeing, the fourth collection of poems from one of the UK's most distinctive poets. The work gathered here displays Ford's power to amuse and startle, to move and disconcert. A number of short poems recreate moments from the poet's peripatetic childhood, while others dramatise more general states of fear and desire, of excitement and anxiety. As Vendler noted, Ford's recent work frequently addresses post-colonial issues arising from the collapse of the British Empire, as well as the paradoxes and information loops of today's globalised economy. Enter, Fleeing is Ford's most exhilarating and powerful volume to date.