Wing

Matthew Francis's latest collection celebrates the richness of nature and of our responses to it. The pleasures of summer are emblazoned in the colourful wings and evocative names of butterflies while a nocturnal encounter with an earwig becomes a joyous incantation to the 'witchy-beetle forkin-robin' of dialect. His love of history embodied in his acclaimed <i>Mandeville</i> and <i>The Mabinogi</i> gives rise to a sequence based on Robert Hooke's microscopic observations. There are tributes to the poets Basho Dafydd ap Gwilym and W. S. Graham to fireworks apple varieties and hot toddies. And in a moving elegy for a friend killed in a parachute accident Francis shows us a vertiginous vision of a world where even the dead 'sleep on the wing'.