"As I emerged from my hip-bath it suddenly dawned / The facts might be remarshalled and shown to rhyme," Mark Ford writes, and a longing for coherent form, for a means of remarshalling the mayhem of the facts into rhyming order, is at the heart of his splendid and difficult new book. But the desperate and hapless characters who inhabit Ford's poems are baffled in their longing. Even as they fashion their perceptions into artistic form, the inextricable incoherence of experience slyly reasserts itself, like a puzzle whose pieces change shape as one works to assemble it. The epigraph of Ford's book, in fact, comes from a novel in which a jigsaw puzzle fanatic dies holding a piece that does not fit the last space of his puzzle, and a similar dilemma confronts Ford's speakers, a sense that the world is made of missing or misshapen pieces, a sense of things that somehow hold together, but cannot really fit.

The artistic impulse, which presents form as a solution to this perplexity, is also what undoes Ford's characters. The need to treat experience in art also means that experience must be treated faithfully; thus incoherence must be allowed into artistic shape, and the quest for formal coherence takes on a comical futility. Lost in traffic jams, threatened by storms, menaced from above by helicopters and muttering wires, Ford's speakers are confounded by the act of explaining themselves, and declare their predicaments in language whose casual, everyday tone is comically at odds with its anxious and detailed complexity:

Others—I am not the first—have found themselves standing
on a seemingly solid patch of cliff that suddenly
starts to slide: as the knees tense and the hips swivel, the winding
path is transformed into a slalom. Through a blizzard of loam
and pebbles, oaths and jests, I tumbled towards the proverbially
treacherous soft landing. A flock of seagulls squawked
and fled, and I remembered a man who claimed he could speak
their language fluently: "Screek!" he'd wail, "Screek, screek!"

I WISH

The grim and bewildering settings through which Ford's speakers wander—the highway, the empty room, the ferny forest, the hazy city—have perhaps something to do with the interior landscapes of Rilke's Duino Elegies, where the hero wanders through the allegorized geography of his own soul. But Ford's "errant protagonists" are as un-Rilkean as they could possibly be; it might even be said that Soft Sift makes a dark comedy out of the loss of Rilkean bearings. Rilke's figures know where they are and have guides to tell them where to go. Ford's are simply lost. "Our maps disagreed," laments the speaker of the book's final poem:

            until now
Only the awful and vacant remain yet
To be prised apart.

THE NIGHTINGALE'S CODE

Certain rhetorical turns which recur in Ford's verse show the sometimes heavy influence of John Ashbery—"Now all and sundry declare that I ought / To have peeled away lightyears before"—and Ford's work, perhaps in consequence, has acquired an Ashberyan reputation for semantic obscurity. But this is unfair. Very little poetry of any originality is immediately accessible, but Ford's is actually rather inviting. Images and storylines return; one traces the movements of large abstractions behind the "devolved particulars" of the text. When Ford writes

            One shivers
or sweats, as the seasons break and fronds and tendrils
turn into wallpaper, and wallpaper into tendrils and fronds,

YOU MUST

it is possible to see both a narrative event—time passes, the seasons change, one moves indoors and outdoors—and an idea of artistic creation, as living nature is translated to the page (fronds and tendrils become wallpaper) where it takes on a new life (wallpaper becomes tendrils and fronds).

It is worth noting that the second epigraph to Ford's book, from Emily Dickinson, delicately opposes the first: "And through a Riddle, at the last— / Sagacity, must go—." The sagacity in the riddle, even if sagacity is only the fraught observation that the quest for form undoes itself, finally prevents his poems about incoherence from being incoherent themselves. Ford knowingly recreates the touching absurdity of Raymond Roussel, the French writer whose intense formal eccentricity he has explored in a booklength study. But unlike Roussel, whose forms are the products of a monomaniacal obsession, Ford maintains a critical distance from his characters, who are like a host of little Roussels; and this distance is also what makes the book moving, because it allows Ford space for sympathy. Ford is neither an aesthete nor an eccentric. He is that rare thing, a serious poet; and Soft Sift is a serious and deeply moving book of poems.

— Brian Phillips