He went to school in London, and attended Oxford university and, as a Kennedy Scholar, Harvard university. He wrote his doctorate at Oxford University on the poetry of John Ashbery, and has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American writing, including on Raymond Roussel. From 1991-1993 he was Visiting Lecturer at Kyoto University in Japan.

He is Professor of English in the Department of English Language and Literature at University College London.

He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and the London Review of Books.

Helen Vendler compared him with John Ashbery.

Poetry

• Landlocked (Chatto & Windus, 1992; 1998)
• Soft Sift (Faber & Faber, 2001/Harcourt Brace, 2003).

Anthologies

• New Chatto Poets: Number Two /Susanne Ehrhardt, Paul May, Lucy Anne Watt, Robert Crawford, Sarah Maguire and Mark Ford Chatto & Windus, 1989

Biography

• (Cornell University Press, 2001)

Criticism