THE POEMS OF R.A.D. FORD

PUBLICATION – 2015

THE POEMS OF R.A.D. FORD
Edited by Seán Haldane and David Cannon
R.A.D. Ford (1915-1998) was Canadian Ambassador to Moscow from 1964 to1980, a friend and translator of Boris Pasternak, Bella Akhmadulina and Andrei Voznesensky (as well as other poets in Serbian and Portuguese – his wife Thereza was Brazilian), and a supporter of Russian dissidents who tactfully conveyed, in perfect Russian, the threat of Western disapproval to the Soviet government. He was the author of Our Man in Moscow and A Moscow Literary Memoir as well as seven books of poems – one of which, Window on the North, won the Governor General’s Award in 1956. He suffered from a rare muscle-wasting condition involving periods of intense pain, and lived most of his adult life outside Canada, at the end in France. In an era of intense competition in the ‘Canlit’ scene, his life as a poet was on the side-lines, and he probably received more recognition in Russia than in Canada. Few poets have kept to such high standards or achieved his level of quiet precision:
I am searching for the right verb
To tell you that I am coming after all

But I do not want an impious word
Or a message distorted

It is almost as important
As the coming itself to put it right

It is not logical but still
When I arrive and you have heard

And you have read the signal
You must know that love

Has justified the journey.

THE POEMS OF R.A.D. FORD contains all poems from his published volumes and almost 30 unpublished poems. This collection will enable him to find his rightful place as a pre-eminent Canadian and English-speaking poet.