Matthew Francis
Faber & Faber
What better way to spend a chilly Saturday in early March, than curled up in a chair with a slender volume of poetry? In Matthew Francis’s Wing, I found the perfect companion for the afternoon, as wan sunshine tried to best the high clouds outside.
It was copy bought in Aldeburgh last September, on our brief escape from London before further measures to combat the pandemic were introduced. Neither The Other Half nor I are big on ‘shopping’, but after we’d booked the break, we discovered that the small town included a serious independent bookshop. And we knew instantly that we would pay at least one visit.
In the event, during a stay of nine nights, I strayed inside three times. Masks were worn, hands sanitised and then encased inside white cotton gloves that were left in a basket to be laundered on leaving. It is not a vast space, but oh, the bliss of being among shelves of books; of plucking unexpected titles off shelves, knowing that this was a well-deserved holiday-from-the-plague treat.
In a selection that was hugely influenced by the nature of the trip, Wing – published earlier in the year – was one of the books that went into my bag.
It is a joy.
With an overarching theme of examining microscopic life – and particularly the insect form – it also brings other wings into its embrace.
After opening the first section, Freefall, with a poem that starts with houseflies buzzing around where Francis is sitting to write, he concludes with a work of the same name – written “in memory of a friend killed in a parachute accident”.
Neither mawkish nor sentimental, this stunning verse blends the human with the natural world – even though the very fact of being in a plane and of parachuting is far from ‘natural’. But as the opening stanza has it:
Out of the metal shell of the plane, he hatched
Into raucous air,
and stretched out, breathless, as he’d done so often,
on the cushion of wind,
to crawl, crablike, across the irregularities
of the buffeting element.
Tissues of cloud below swathed the greens and yellows
of a chequered world.
The subject might seem out of place in a book of nature poetry, but it brings to mind Icarus and, in a collection titled Wing, is a counter – and poignant one at that – to the apparent effortlessness of flight in the non-human world; a reminder too, of the fragility of life.
The middle section of this collection is named Micrographia, after the “scientific treatise by Robert Hooke (1665)”, an English scientist who, with a microscope, was the first to visualise a micro-organism.
It is a remarkable melding of science and nature, as the microscope increases both understanding and also mystery.
The final section, Canticles, is more playful.
In Collective, for instance, Francis reinvents collective nouns: instead of a ‘clattering’ or a ‘train’, he posits a delightful “funambulism of jackdaws”. Forget ‘gaggle’, here we have a “chevron of geese” – how much more picturesque and accurate? – and a “double-take of blackbirds”.
And the poem finishes with a “shifting mandelbrot of starlings” – a glorious description of a murmuration, bringing science/maths into the impossibility of such miraculous formations.
In Sea Canticle, one cand almost hear the haunting tones of Debussy’s La cathédrale engloutie (Sunken Cathedral), as the varied inhabitants of the seafloor float liquidly over and around the remains of a sunken sailing ship.
Wing is a glorious collection that, overall, has a quality of meditative awe at the complexity of life, even at its tiniest.
Wondrous.
