DRAGONS

¶ Dragons is Matthew Francis’s second poetry collection published with Faber & Faber Ltd.

THESE ARE LEFTOVER COPIES FROM MATTHEW FRANCIS’S BOOK LAUNCH IN TORONTO IN 2005.

¶ Matthew Francis populates his second collection with dragons, devils, butterflies, and ornamental hermit, a forest god and a whole ocean full of creatures, from whales and cuttlefish to the denizens of deep-sea hydrothermal vents. But strangest of all are the human beings—the ecstasies and indignities of their sexual rites of passage, the routine craziness of their dream lives, the frantic and sometimes terrible adventures of recent and not-so-recent history. (Faber).

• Francis has impressive formal skills and a nicely understated manner; his quiet accuracies grow on you at successive readings. ❧ William Scammell, Independent on Sunday

• The strength of Francis's poetry derives from its precise balance between the surreal and the real; he never lets his conceits get out of hand, but uses them to unsettle a predictable view. His directness of language and diction, and a pleasant metrical sense, allow him to smuggle through more disturbing thoughts and ideas, proving himself more than capable of being both accessible and ambitious. ❧ Robert Potts, The Guardian

¶ Matthew Francis is the author of seven volumes of poetry published by Faber & Faber, most recently Wing (2020). He has twice been shortlisted for the Forward Prize, and in 2004 was chosen as one of the Next Generation Poets. He has also edited W. S. Graham’s New Collected Poems (Faber & Faber, 2004) and New Selected Poems (Faber & Faber, 2019), and is the author of a study of Graham, Where the People Are (Salt Publishing, 2004). Francis has published a collection of short stories and three novels, the third of which is forthcoming with Neem Tree Press, Nocturne with Gaslamps (2024), as well as a non-fiction study, Depersonalization and Creative Writing: Unreal City (Routledge, 2023).