The Best British Poetry 2014

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...

-- Boyd Tonkin * The Independe