Nairobi, 1963; Lagos 1967; Chicago 1969; Colombo, Hong Kong, Bahrain, New York… Mark Ford’s poems could – several of them – be organised like an airport departure board. Born in Kenya, he had a peripatetic upbringing. There are sightings here of his mother – telling an unfazed Kenyan servant that President Kennedy has been shot, or chasing a thief in Lagos, unaware of how her own voice will sound, years later, in a poem: “How dare you!” she calls without irony.
There are poems about what it means to take leave of yourself – Mickey Finn describes, at entertainingly floundering length, the after-effects of having had a drink spiked, and your trainers and wallet stolen on a Spanish train. It seems fitting that Ford should, in his intelligent restlessness, turn out to be an airport fancier. In Aloft, a poem-in-transit, he writes:
“An airport
is a delightful retreat for any mind grown weary
of the struggles of life.”
He notes the “mysterious, aristocratic sort of/pleasure to be derived” in watching those with no wish to travel, yet seems unlikely himself to be detained on the viewing deck.
The collection’s wonderful title, Enter, Fleeing, is a stage direction that sets the tone for what follows – a running away with himself. He quotes Emily Brontë: “Well we must be for ourselves in the long run.” The question that keeps surfacing is how serious he is about himself: it often seems that there is a satisfaction in acting, affecting a limp in Show Time, donning his brother’s maroon school hat in Enter, Fleeing, or in Brighton Rock, battering his temples in “a fit of mock/Self-Punishment”. Never less than amusing, he kindles uncertainty: where does his ambivalence leave his readers? There is a trace of the mock-heroic and an anti-poetic stuttering (“The Jolly R-R-Roger”/ “s-s-s-softly”/ “y-y-youth”). And while poetry might prefer not to hesitate, Ford twists its tongue. Authenticity is a complicated matter: sometimes it is easiest to cast oneself as an understudy.
This applies, too, in a literary sense. Ford is an academic (he teaches English at University College London), and literature, one feels, is enabling and obstructive by turns. In New York, 1982, he writes:
“A loft on Cosby Street: I thought
to have employed
a bit of Ovid, skilfully
updated, to explain
what happened in it.”
Is this playful – or a cop-out? Both, maybe. Either way, Ovid fails to come up trumps and one suspects that whatever happened in the loft was not much fun. In Viewless Wings, it is Keats who gets caught up in a Hitchcockian, anaesthetic-driven bad dream. In A Broken Appointment, it is Thomas Hardy, not Ovid, who is missed. It is a witty flat white of a poem, a bathetic fallacy. (Perhaps this is, in part, the side-effect of having written a brilliant book about Hardy – Half a Londoner.)
Ford’s command of form, evident in his traumatised almost-but- not-quite-villanelles (Brighton Rock and Driveaway), only serves to emphasise the far-from-full disclosure of the content. But he allows for the pleasures of recycling: no line stays fixed – linguistic restlessness keeps pace with his own. In Hong Kong, 1973, he describes the way in which he and his sister wrote letters to a “wholly fictitious building we’d invented” – and yet somehow the letters reached his parents: “O ingenious postman! – you delved beneath the words we wrote and discovered what we meant.” You need to be a bit of a Hong Kong postman to read Mark Ford right, to discover what he means and get past the occasional false address.
• Enter, Fleeing by Mark Ford is published by Faber (£10.99). To order a copy for £9.34 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
A Broken Appointment
I opened the envelope: it contained
a ticket in my name from London
St Pancras to Paris Nord, departing at 9.17 on the
twelfth
of the twelfth, a Friday; coach 3
seat 27, non-smoking; and another
for returning the following day, at thirteen
minutes past two, in the afternoon – dans l’après
midi; and a postcard of Pierre
Bonnard’s Le Bol de Lait, and there was just
one word on the back – Come – followed
by an x. Whenever
I pour
a dish of milk, or dwell
on the loop in the C of her
unfamiliar hand, I can’t
help thinking – ‘Oh
what a poem – what a poem Thomas Hardy
might have written
about this!’
