Wing

Matthew Francis' latest collection celebrates the richness of nature and our responses to it, featuring butterflies, earwigs, fireworks, apple varieties, and hot toddies, as well as a moving elegy for a friend killed in a parachute accident.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 80 pages
Publication date: 19 August 2021
Publisher: Faber & Faber

Matthew Francis' latest collection is a celebration of the richness of nature and our responses to it. The joys of summer are embodied in the colorful 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. Francis' love of history, embodied in his acclaimed Mandeville and The Mabinogi, 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.

Matthew Francis' latest collection is a celebration of the richness of nature and our responses to it. The joys of summer are embodied in the colorful 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. Francis' love of history, embodied in his acclaimed Mandeville and The Mabinogi, 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.

Weight: 110g
Dimension: 131 x 196 x 10 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780571358625
Edition number: Main