Table of Contents
- Contents
- Foreword by Roddy Lumsden
- Introduction by Mark Ford
- Mir Mahfuz Ali
- MIG-21 Raids at Shegontola
- Rachael Allen
- Science and Math
- Robert Anthony
- Clouds
- Simon Armitage
- Emergency
- Michael Bayley
- Estuary
- Fiona Benson
- Toboggan Run
- Emily Berry
- Picnic
- Liz Berry
- Scenes from The Passion – The First Path
- Rachael Boast
- The North Porch
- Alan Brownjohn
- Index of First Lines
- Colette Bryce
- Don’t speak to the Brits, just pretend they don’t exist
- John Burnside
- Choir
- Dominic Bury
- A Prism of Signs
- Anthony Caleshu
- from The Victor Poems
- Geraldine Clarkson
- The thing about Grace and Laura
- Sophie Collins
- Desk
- Joey Connolly
- Chekhov’s Gun
- Siân Melangell Dafydd
- Big Cats
- Joe Dresner
- a glass of ice cold milk
- Laura Elliott
- Skype Blinks
- Malene Engelund
- The Terns
- Richard Evans
- Space Invader
- Ruth Fainlight
- The Motorway
- Matthew Francis
- Silverfish, Moth
- Claudia Friedrich
- My Disseration No Plagiarisation!
- Matthew Gregory
- A Room at the Grand Hotel des Roches Noires, 1971
- David Harsent
- Fire: end-scenes and outtakes
- Lee Harwood
- The Oak Coffer
- Oli Hazzard
- from Within Habit
- Sarah Howe
- A loop of jade
- Caoilinn Hughes
- Bruisewort
- Kirsten Irving
- No Fish Are We Now
- Alan Jenkins
- Deptford
- Mimi Khalvati
- Bringing Down the Stars
- Hannah Lowe
- The Other Family
- Lydia MacPherson
- Lithium Lovesong
- Glyn Maxwell
- Modu and Mahu
- Chris McCabe
- The Duchess of Malfi
- Christopher Middleton
- Go With Isaac Rosenberg
- Andrew Motion
- The Mill
- André Naffis-Sahely
- Through the Rockies
- John North
- Summer Solstice, Cumbria
- Ruth Padel
- The Chain
- Abigail Parry
- Girl to Snake
- Christopher Riesco
- Caliban Life
- Carol Rumens
- Easter Snow
- Declan Ryan
- Ethiopia Shall Stretch Forth Her Hands
- Richard Scott
- Pilgrimage
- Ian Seed
- Prize-Giving
- Martha Sprackland
- ‘Dooms’
- Julian Stannard
- September 1939
- Jon Stone
- Endings to Adventure Gamebooks 22
- Todd Swift
- Red Shoes
- George Szirtes
- Sealed With a Kiss
- Rebecca Tamás
- A Trip With Werner Herzog
- Philip Terry
- Inferno: Canto I
- Helen Tookey
- Fosse Way
- Jack Underwood
- Thank you for your email
- Mark Waldron
- First off,
- Kate Wakeling
- Riddle
- Sarah Wardle
- Freeman
- Sarah Westcott
- Messenger
- Sam Willetts
- Caravaggio
- Hugo Williams
- from Notes from Dialysis
- John Hartley Williams
- I Inspect the Storm
- William Wootten
- The Harvest
About the Author
Mark Ford was born in 1962 in Nairobi, Kenya. He has published four
volumes of poetry, Landlocked (1992), Soft Sift (2001), Six
Children (2011) and Selected Poems (2014), and three collections of
essays. He has also written a biography of the French poet,
playwright and novelist Raymond Roussel, and translated Roussel's
New Impressions of Africa. His anthology London: A History in Verse
was published in 2012. He is a regular contributor to the London
Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. He teaches in the
English Department at University College London.
Reviews
Mark Ford has gathered together poems born of London, in
conversation with London, in combat with London, in awe of London,
most of which were first published in London, centre of print and
power. Covering six and a half centuries of wandering, whoring,
watching, drinking, dancing, praying, building, courting, and
cursing, here can be found Wordsworth’s ‘endless stream of men and
moving things’, even when, as Fleur Adcock puts it, ‘the traffic’s
as abominable as ever’. Packed as the Underground, this is as
essential a guide to London as the A–Z.
*Frances Wilson*
...the boy Ford done good, has done us proud, has played a blinder.
I have never come across a London anthology... as rich, as bold, as
multifarious as this... Olympic visitors should lug this brick back
home for a pungent souvenir of the original "maximum city" in all
it grot and grandeur...
*The Independent*
