Mandeville

<i></i>The Travels of Sir John Mandeville was one of the most popular books of the later Middle Ages. Purporting to describe the circumnavigation of an English knight through Africa India and the Middle East in 1322 the narrative is a fantastical collection of sights: seas islands phoenixes pyramids rocks that enchant ships and apes that contain human souls interwoven with geographical descriptions that are perfectly accurate. Matthew Francis's new collection is a sequence of poems that celebrate and give voice to Mandeville in his own words caught as he is between physical and symbolic geographies between a world that is round and one that has Jerusalem at its centre. And all of it narrated in the terse solitary conflicted and strangely passionate voice of this medieval Crusoe whose very existence was disputed.