The Green Month

Emma — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Dafydd ap Gwilym, Wales’s greatest poet, explored love, desire and the natural world with startling frankness and virtuoso wit. In a sequence freely adapted from Dafydd’s work, Matthew Francis brings him to life for the modern English-speaking reader: as he waits in the woods for his lover, ogles the girls in church or causes chaos during a midnight assignation. Plants, birds and animals are fondly invoked while weather and the elements – wind, waves, fog and ice – play their part. Passionate in his treatment of sexual themes, Dafydd is equally ready to make fun of his own susceptibility. These delightful poems remain, across the centuries, intimate, urgent and timeless.

‘One of our most skilled, intriguing and consistently ambitious poets.’ Sarah Crown, Guardian

‘The Mabinogi in Matthew Francis’s poetic retelling . . . blazes with fresh and exciting strangeness.’ Marina Warner, Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year

Wing

Emma — Thu, 19 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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. Francis’s 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’.

Francis, Matthew – The Bell Bookshop

The Green Month

Wing