Whereabouts is a limited-edition collection published by the Canadian small press rufus books. It consists of 35 poems, each in the same six-line syllabic form, evoking places from Cambridge to Zimbabwe, and from Aberystwyth to Estonia. Following a rave review in The Guardian, it received more critical attention than any of my books to that point. Read a poem from my 2005 collection here.

 

"Matthew Francis already has an impressive pedigree. With this outstanding volume, his place among contemporary British poetry's aristocracy is confirmed... a collection that resembles a series of luminous miniatures, painted on the page in precise and glowing brush-strokes." (Sarah Crown, The Guardian)
 

"Francis's style is clever ebullient, pacey, often brilliant." (Amy Wack, Poetry Wales)

"The form, and Francis's often whimsical lyricism, give the volume its delicate coherence... Part of the pleasure of the book comes from the freshness of the poems' observations, such as a spider's "dry / posy of legs", the determination in a dead animal's stillness, and dogwood trees each "adrift in its // vanilla float", to name only a few. The more particular interest of the collection arises from the sense of a positive instability in the world, in natural change and shifting perspectives." (Carrie Etter, TLS)

"The way in which Francis navigates through the strictures of his form, doubling and tripling meanings as he goes, is not just astonishingly virtuosic, but moving: he is a poetic Houdini, escaping into a locked box in order to liberate his subject self." (David C. Ward, PN Review)