Poetry and Chapbook Review
Arlene Ang
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Dragons
Matthew Francis
Faber and Faber, 2001 |
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A
fascinating kaleidoscope of fauna and adventures, Matthew Francis'
second collection displays impressive craft and depth of imagination.
Each one of the 29 poems reawakens that childlike delight in discovery.
His observations are transparent, often surreal, but always firmly
accurate.
Francis opens with
an almost hypnotic poem bearing the same title, Dragons:
It
was not the ideal day to go looking for dragons–
drizzly. You want it crisp, what you call dragons'
weather. They stay inside when it's wet. Dragons
are great ones for forty winks. There must be dragons
snoring underneath us this minute in the old dragons'
tunnels.
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The repetition is subtle yet insistent like rain in the background. The
tone, light and understated, pleasantly snares the reader to suspend
disbelief. And this is just the beginning.
TLS/Blackwell's 2000 Prize winner, The
Ornamental Hermit is more serious. A somber personification of
solitude, either for the sake of love or money, it also brings to mind
the duties of Thanatos, even Christ:
Hermits were all the
rage these days but this one
could not have been laid on as an ornament
for houseparties. Some of the guests went so far
as to doubt his existence, or at least claimed
that he had long ago climbed the wall, leaving
his implements in the slowly filling hole.
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Francis
also wields great mastery over longer poems. Ocean is haunting as only a
thalassophobic's tribute can be. Armed with sea-eyes to open the dark, he
immortalizes creatures in their many colors: anemones, frightened
scallops, starfishes that form fumbling
galaxies, sea urchins, whelks, an angry crab, sponge-fields, a
spiky sea cucumber flexing itself on
its nipples of legs, squid, seasnakes and weever fish. This
excerpt from the first part, Margin
recounts:
People who live
close to the sea get shrivelled by it.
They cultivate nets, parched ropes and grey splintered wood,
essences of tar, seaweed and bird-droppings,
orange plastic and blistering front doors.
o
. . .
g
Gulls like detached waves are
its emblem, doodled
in the margin.
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Frog Chronicle, no doubt, remains
Francis' masterpiece. This 12-part poem confesses the narrator's first
sexual encounters, the disappointments–all very tactfully
done in choirboy's handwriting, especially the renaming of parts and
functions. A virgin, for example, fittingly masquerades as a cherub, and is defined in his
glossary as an unfallen angel in the
void:
Amanda fizzled out.
I was still a cherub
a word I always hated for its soft
scriptural overtones, a word for girls.
For me cherubhood was an albatross.
They can smell a cherub coming. They know
by the way my voice goes up at the end of a sentence?
I'll never live it down. ...
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Twentieth-Century Dream, a suitable
finale for the book, creeps into the reader's mind from the year 1900
to 1999. It is a dark and surreal journey through time, injected with
familiar names and faces that mark the different periods. 1920-1929 is
remembered thus:
a long time passes.
I'm at a dance:
Cubist dresses in liqueur colours,
smoke in the air and the musicians
playing tin cans and old newspapers.
I can't find out who's paying for this
but it's been the cocktail hour for years
and they haven't called time. The police
keep raiding, but so does Al Capone.
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And
so Francis' draws the curtains:
.... In a minute
a hundred years has gone, and the past
is all a dream, and I wake from it.
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In
every sense, Dragons swirls
like a dream. Francis' poetry alights from magical creatures, dives
into the
ocean, blows through different autumns, ghosts Winchester tourist
sites, roams the forest, walks into a nest of devils and spends a night
in the temple. With Twentieth-Century
Dream, waking up has never been harder.
Copyright ©
2004 Arlene Ang
Jun/Jul
2004
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Arlene Ang is a contributing editor
for Poems Niederngasse and editor of the Italian Edition
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