THIS DIALOGUE OF ONE: ESSAYS ON POETS FR Format: Paperback

Literary Nonfiction. Literary Criticism. Essays. Poetry. Winner of the 2015 Poetry Foundation's Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. THIS DIALOGUE OF ONE collects thirteen essays on English, French and American poets by one of the era's most engaging and highly esteemed poet-critics. Like Randall Jarrell, whose achievement is assessed here, Ford combines a refreshing openness to innovation with an authoritative awareness of what makes a poem stand the test of time. Witty, astute and wide-ranging, Ford demonstrates his formidable gifts as a close reader of poetry, whether exploring canonical works by the likes of Whitman, Dickinson, Baudelaire and T.S. Eliot, or championing the cause of neglected figures such as James Thomson, Samuel Greenberg and Joan Murray. As John Lanchester once observed of Ford's essays, "If more literary criticism were like this, more people would read it."

Mark Ford has published four volumes of poetry, Landlocked (1992), Soft Silt (2001), Six Children (2011) and Selected Poems (2014). 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. THIS DIALOGUE OF ONE is his third collection of essays. He teaches in the English Department at University College London.