A Review of Ann Wroe's Verse Biography of Saint Francis of Assisi

"Ann Wroe, accomplished biographer of Shelley, Pontius Pilate and Orpheus, has elected to recount the life of Saint Francis of Assisi as he lived it – through song," writes Kate Kellaway for The Guardian in a review of Francis: A Life in Songs (Jonathan Cape, 2018). An excerpt:

Not known as a poet (she is obituaries editor on the Economist), Wroe has launched into rhyme as if (as must be the case) she has always been at home in verse. It is with a feeling of incredulous excitement that one realises that this is no less than a devotional book – beautifully published by Cape, with an image of Saint Francis taken from a medieval fresco in Subiaco, Italy, on its blue cloth-bound cover. In our secular age, the book seems literarily heretical – triumphantly unfashionable. But do not imagine it to be conventionally devout. It does what poetry is meant to do, and seldom does: it takes you to another place while making you reflect on what it is to be here.

Its experimental structure intrigues: each section of Saint Francis’s life is divided into four parts, like the panels of an altarpiece. Wroe begins with biographical information. Next comes a poem about Francis’s life, and then a companion poem (subtle, contemporary and sometimes only tenuously linked to whatever aspect of his life has just been raised), and, finally, “a grace note” – a handful of lines linking one section to the next...

Read on at The Guardian.