Matthew Francis – Wing (Faber & Faber, 2020)
One of the surprises of Matthew Francis’s poetry collection Wing is that the poet as an individual (the private man behind the public poet, if you will) rarely seems to reveal himself beyond the opening poem ‘Longhouse Autumn’; aside from the ventriloquising middle section (‘Micrographia’) in which Francis sees and describes the world through the lens and tongue of Robert Hooke, there is just a sprinkling of the first person subject pronoun, ‘I’, and a scattering of its plural form.
Why was I surprised by this? Have I become too accustomed to poetry being personal, intimate, confessional? Am I so used to seeing the hand and heart of the writer beating across the page?
Or perhaps, more simply, that opening, rather lovely poem establishes a sense of expectation of what is to follow, with that opening line: ‘An attic room stuffed with heat. I write at the window.’
Regardless, for the many of these poems, there is a kind of detachment that is almost clinical or scientific, a characteristic which nonetheless aligns with the poet’s tightness of form and his striking, startling original phrasing that offers continuity across the poetry collection as a whole and which will give any reader pause.
Here and there, the space between poem and (this) reader – brought about by the relatively impersonal tone, as well as opaque, often technical language drawn from specific fields of science – felt too wide, and consequently left me unmoved. I did, however, appreciate the skill and artistry of the writing, the surgical precision of word choice and place. Indeed, I like that these little-used words are used, still hold currency, have rhythms I can marvel at and meanings I can stretch for.
But how often are we happy reaching for the dictionary? Is there a level of complexity or lexical obscurity that renders a piece of writing unintelligible? Is it the responsibility of the writer to ensure comprehensibility or for the reader to work at decoding – and in so doing, to learn, grow, feel the reward of the effort?
There are no easy answers to these questions and perhaps it’s for each writer to decide where to place their lines on the sand. Besides, perhaps more than anywhere else, poetry allows – delights, even – in the stretching of language, ambiguity and the mysterious. What we might otherwise find intolerable in prose, we may deem permissible in poetry.
Matthew Francis’s delightful, playful, jazzy poem ‘A Charm for Earwigs’ exemplifies these points perfectly with its two middle stanzas, in which the narrator addresses an ear-burrowing earwig:
‘Arrywiggle, horny-gollach,
you awoke me from my sturpor,
rasping with a chitin stylus
on my mind’s long-playing vinyl,
ratcheting my taut tympanum
with your cacophonic tarsi,’
Here is an instance in which, though the words may be unknown to us, the meaning is expertly conveyed – in part through the careful word-order, direct address and clever use of prepositions. And one can’t help but fall in love with the Scots’ word for an earwig: ‘Horny-gollach’ suits the small critter sublimely so.
Elsewhere, the poems have a similar density and frame of reference – but without either the playfulness or the touch of the personal, I found myself less open and responsive to the text. ‘Elixir’, a poem that lists a range of ailments and salves, felt clever and academic rather than moving or novel. It did not, I think, reframe my point of reference, allow me to see the world, or parts of the world anew. There will, though, always be poems within a collection that leave one unstirred and in that sense it’s not so different from going to an artist’s exhibition and finding a painting here and there does not hit the mark, subjectively speaking. And that, naturally, is a good thing. Let us all enjoy our preferences.
It is, in my view, the middle section of the collection, ‘Micrographia’ where Matthew Francis brings together his evident interests, his outstanding eye and ear for original phrasing, and his technical skill.
‘Micrographia’, written after the treatise by Robert Hooke (1635 – 1703), these twelve poems are as precise and miraculous as Hooke’s own spectacular draughtsmanship. Here, Francis reveals a clutch of natural objects, from snow and sand, to moss, nettle, flea and fly-wing. There is a charming first line in the opening poem ‘The Microscope’: ‘This morning the sun nuzzles the glass.’ The verb suggests a tender delicacy and it’s with this same care and respect that the narrator (Hooke, in this case) observes the varied subjects of the natural world; this clever man who has
‘…trapped some of the day
in a square mirror
so that it lights up a specimen’
enlarges our understanding and our sense of what the speaker observes in language that delights, just as his own microscopic view must have delighted and surprised him, as well as those who encountered his drawings.
And so it is that ice becomes ‘a fluff cumulus, like the beard on old jam’ (Ice, Snow; p.26) while fish scales are
‘fingernail-smooth, only
a shifting pattern of sheen
hinting at ocean.’
(Fishscale, Feather; p.30)
Here, Francis beautifully employs sibilance to emphasise the whispering ebb and flow, swash and backwash of the sea, its waves, its tides.
Touchingly, too, the poet reveals Hook’s awe and the way the microscopic reorients his perception of the world, as in ‘Sand, Coral’ where he states:
‘The least part of the world is greater than we had guessed,
so that the world as a whole…’ (p.28)
The ellipsis silently overflows with wonder.
I also enjoyed the observation, poignant in its simplicity as well as its substance, that
‘Things forget what they were, and become
what they are made of.’
(Moss, Mould; p.32)
Despite the emphasis on the natural world, a lexical technicality and a penchant for drawing inspiration from the (fairly) distant past, I have yet to arrive at a clear, sensible conclusion as to exactly how the three parts cohere.
Does that matter? Not especially, and the creative and intellectual failing is certainly mine, particularly when considering the poet’s pedigree and current oeuvre (this is his fifth Faber collection and he’s won multiple awards). A better question, and one I hope to answer at the end of most reviews, is this: Would I recommend Wing to others?
Well, yes. With the caveat that I think Matthew Francis presents himself here as a poet’s poet – by which I mean it is not as readily accessible as other collections one might find in large bookshops. It’s not, I suspect, the sort of collection you’d read on a commute. Or at least not a noisy, bustling, tussling one. I, at least, needed the quiet and stretches of uninterrupted peace to digest and think about the poems. And, sometimes, to look things up.
Worth the hours and the effort? Absolutely. While there were occasional moments when I struggled to connect with a poem, these were far outweighed by the numerous times in which I encountered lines I could do nothing but marvel at. Take, for instance, the start of ‘A Dream of Cornwall’ which begins:
‘Now only the sea is ahead of us,
a meniscus of blue, un-scratched by waves.’
Isn’t that fantastic? Doesn’t it magnify our sense of the sea?
Whether he’s looking at the past, present, or even the future, through microscopes or telescopes or at rare Anglo-Saxon medical texts, let us hope Matthew Francis dreams and writes on.
Poetry review by r.m.d.