Here be dragons, devils, butterflies, an ornamental hermit, a forest god and a whole ocean full of creatures, from whales and cuttlefish to the denizens of deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Strangest of all are the human beings, the ecstasies and indignities of their sexual rites of passage, the routine craziness of their dream lives, the frantic and sometimes terrible events of recent and not-so-recent history. Dragons was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry and the Welsh Book of the Year Award. One of the poems, 'The Ornamental Hermit', won first prize in the TLS / Blackwell's Poetry Competition. Read a poem from my 2001 Faber and Faber collection here.

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"The strength of Francis's poetry derives from its precise balance between the surreal and the real; he never lets his conceits get out of hand, but uses them to unsettle a predictable view. His directness of language and diction, and a pleasant metrical sense, allow him to smuggle through more disturbing thoughts and ideas, proving himself more than capable of being both accessible and ambitious." (Robert Potts, The Guardian)

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"I’d ... list 'Frog Chronicle' and 'Twentieth-Century Dream' from Dragons as super-poems in the Francis oeuvre. 'Frog Chronicle' literally invents a new language for sex, à la the worst sex education class imaginable, and manages to be both funny and excoriatingly ashamed at the same time. 'Twentieth-Century Dream' takes us on a roller-coaster trance-ride, one stanza per decade, between 1900 and 1999, in which an amazing amount of what happened manages to get convincingly summed up in less than two pages." (Sinéad Morrissey, Poetry Foundation)