My latest collection, Wing,  celebrates the richness of nature and of our responses to it. The pleasures of summer are emblazoned in the colourful wings and evocative names of butterflies, while a nocturnal encounter with an earwig becomes a joyous incantation to the ‘witchy-beetle, forkin-robin’ of dialect. My love of history, embodied in Mandeville and The Mabinogi, gives rise to a sequence based on Robert Hooke's microscopic observations. There are tributes to the poets Basho, Dafydd ap Gwilym and W. S. Graham, to fireworks, apple varieties, and hot toddies. And in an elegy for a friend killed in a parachute accident I evoke a vertiginous vision of a world where even the dead ‘sleep on the wing’ . Read a poem from my 2020 Faber and Faber collection here.

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“Nature does not go out of fashion and we need poetry of this quality more than ever. Wing... is a joy. Francis is... 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.” Kate Kellaway, The Observer

 

“Linguistic precision sustains his new collection... reading it can sometimes feel like watching a darts champion hit the bullseye again and again. Rusty clouds of ladybirds that come drifting across the garden scatter inside the house like ‘coral beads from a broken necklace’ . 'Iron filing birds’ billow above a pier before being sucked down. And a bus heaving through the Welsh countryside at night is a ‘box of dirty light’ ... Reading the collection first time round, I had to look up every so often; bask in the gorgeousness of the language for a bit, then get back to work...” (Leaf Arbuthnot, Standpoint)

 

“I suspect Wing will chime especially well in our current situation. For those lucky enough to be quarantined near it, nature has been a great comfort. For those unable to stroll down the beaches of Wales, Francis’s writing is the next best thing to being there: so vivid and joyous, it may just reproduce some of that calming effect. As with the Bonfire Night poem ‘Devil Among the Tailors’, his images have taken on an unexpected resonance: ‘We’ll meet at arm’s length, lighting one sparkler from another / in a metal kiss.’”  James Riding, The London Magazine.

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"The voluptuous caressing of apples and apple names in ‘Pomona’  or of festive drinks in ‘Wassail’ is an almost physical pleasure. Descriptions of mushroom hunting in ‘Liberty Caps’ create an extraordinary brew of sensations, plunging us into the wet earthiness of woods and fields, drawing us with dreamlike intensity into gothic fantasies, suddenly releasing us with stabs of wit. Francis’s gift for metaphor is closely related to the sensuous evocativeness of his writing.” Edmund Prestwich, Acumen.  

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“This is Keats’s idea of poetry ‘not matured by law and precept, but by sensation or watchfulness in itself’ . The whole laborious business of finding the right word has become an unhurried rhapsody. What better for this time of uncertainty and fear? Wing ends on a note of hope, in ‘King of a Rainy Country’ , musing on nature and our ability to appreciate it in language: ‘Some empire, this soss, stott, plother. You can’t see / the borders. It doesn’t look as if it will ever stop’ ”. Graeme Richardson, TLS.

“...Uncanny accuracy of observation and word choice. The ‘seedcake fragrance of aunts (‘Pomona’ ), the late sky that is ‘custard curdled with rhubarb' (‘Rose Absolute’ ), the seemingly dead ant that ‘rose to all its feet' (‘Ant’ ). This is not the desperate search for novelty that causes some poets to scrabble for incongruous words and far-fetched comparisons: it is the freshness that comes of observing closely and describing exactly... There has always been an exuberant delight in the beauty and variety of the world in Francis’s poems.” Sheenagh Pugh.

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“Wing feels like a labour of love, a culmination of countless tender interactions with nature. At times the poems are deeply sensual, such as in the collection’s very first poem ‘Longhouse Autumn’ in which the writer is so attuned to his environment that he detects ‘A funny taste in the light, the copper tang of late afternoon.’  The atmosphere is gentle and compassionate from the outset, where even a church is personified; the poet passes by as it is ‘tending its flock of gravestones’ ”.  Sophie Baggott, Wales Arts Review.

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“Francis has an uncanny gift that sets him apart from other poets. His use of language is so precise; he is a linguist with a scalpel, ready to cut words open and arrange a masterpiece... a gifted poet with an extraordinary ability to break down the most minute and mundane elements of our physical world and display the beauty within them.”  Desi Tsvetkova, New Welsh Review.

 

"Francis's remarkable gift is for attentive looking, and Wing is crammed with precise, brilliant observations. 'Crossing the ford at Neen Savage, the tyres sprouted wings of water'; 'a pillage of seagulls', a new collective noun in a poem about collective nouns; two sparklers' "metal kiss till the magma bead at the centre brightens, / showering the garden with sparrowclaws of light.'" Craig Raine, TLS Books of the Year.