Kate Kellaway Reviews Matthew Francis's Latest

Over at The Guardian, Kate Kellaway writes about Matthew Francis's latest book, which also happens to be The Guardian's Poetry Book of the Month. Wing, recently published by Faber & Faber, Kellaway writes "is a joy." More: 

Francis is a Welsh poet – occasionally recalling Dylan Thomas, only that he goes gently into his subject matter, more interested in what he sees than in himself. He is – a further pleasure – incapable of being anything other than clear. His opening poem, Longhouse Autumn, is hospitable and specific. He situates himself in a Welsh longhouse, a “whitewashed slump of stone in the crook of a lane”. He shares what he sees – blackberries in the hedgerows, pigeon droppings on the path, a church “weatherproofed with slate/and tending its flock of gravestones”. This last image is typical in its graceful insight. I’d never thought of a church’s relationship to its graves this way and now always will.

Insects abound and the poems celebrate the world’s creepy-crawly beauty. A marvellous sequence is based on Robert Hooke’s scientific treatise of 1668 in which ice, snow, sand, feathers, fish scales and moss are put under the microscope in astonishing, otherworldly detail.

Francis is an inspiring miniaturist whose witty connectivity delights. In Ladybird Summer, a plague of ladybirds is described “mating like Tiddlywinks”. This arresting poem then slides into a lament for a gone-wrong season. Francis finds a wonderfully unforced way of expressing it: “There was too much summer”. (Elsewhere, he arrives at a similar simplicity: “When I switch off the day” or “Evening keeps gaining on us”).

Read on at The Guardian.