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Like his acclaimed Mandeville (2008), Matthew Francis’s fourth Faber collection explores a world of marvels, real and fantastic. A man takes off for the moon in an engine drawn by geese, a poltergeist moves into a remote Welsh village, and a party of seventeenth-century Englishmen encounter the wonders of Russia – sledges, vodka, skating and Easter eggs. The scientist Robert Boyle basks in the newly discovered radiance of phosphorus (the noctiluca of the title) and the theme of light in darkness is taken up by the more personal poems in the book: phoneboxes, streetlamps, moonlight. The joys of the world and of the imagination find their equivalent in Francis’s joy in the possibilities of language:
‘A basket of snow for the Empress / with a poem of
modest triumph: / I made this out of what does not last.’
Matthew Francis has lived in Wales for 25 years and his poetic version of the Welsh national epic The Mabinogi has been widely acclaimed. He has published six collections of poetry with Faber including Wing (2021), and edited W. S. Graham’s New Collected Poems. His other work includes a collection of short stories and three novels.
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