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Collected Poems, 1936-1796
Published by: University of Massachusetts Press
304 Pages
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Gathered here in their entirety are the seven previous volumes of Robert Francis poetry — Stand with Me Here, Valhalla and Other Poems, The Sound I Listened For, The Face against the Glass, The Orb Weaver, Come Out into the Sun, and Like Ghosts of Eagles — together with a group of recent poems, many not previously published but "saved" to end this volume on a note of newness.
Because the original seven volumes are kept in chronological order, the reader can follow the author's journey from his quiet early work to poetry of greater color, warmth, vitality, vivacity, and sportiveness; and can note just when and where Francis' style becomes more and more diversified, with word-count, fragmented surface, and the celebration of words themselves.
The book is graced with eight wood engravings by Wang Hui-Ming.
Because the original seven volumes are kept in chronological order, the reader can follow the author's journey from his quiet early work to poetry of greater color, warmth, vitality, vivacity, and sportiveness; and can note just when and where Francis' style becomes more and more diversified, with word-count, fragmented surface, and the celebration of words themselves.
The book is graced with eight wood engravings by Wang Hui-Ming.
A nationally acclaimed poet, Robert Francis was awarded the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1984 for "distinguished poetic achievement." His other honors include the Rome Prize Fellowship given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Shelley Award of the Poetry Society of America, the Golden Rose Award of the New England Poetry Club, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, and the Brandeis Creative Arts Award. The University of Massachusetts Press named its annual Juniper Prize in honor of Francis, who for many years lived at Fort Juniper in Amherst.
"Brings together seven earlier collections of poetry by Robert Francis, a brilliant and neglected New England poet who is beginning to achieve the recognition he deserves. The Collected Poems, along with his autobiography, The Trouble with Francis (1971), belongs in every academic library."—Choice
"Francis is a modern American classic, better (say) than almost anyone who has been gifted with a Pulitzer or a National Book Award in recent decades. I claim him as better (say) than John Berryman or Robert Penn Warren or Delmore Schwartz or A. R. Ammons, and these people have written beautiful poems. As with Hardy, as with Frost, as with Richard Wilbur who has learned from him, Francis must be read in bulk. He does not write big poems. The accrual of small triumphs -- told in the same skeptical, tender, funny, and reticent language — makes a big poem out of this Collected Poems."—Donald Hall, Ohio Review
"Francis's lean puritan wit, his impishness, his insatiable meddling with forms and tones and voices which few poets of our era match, his homegrown nonconformity to any school of poetry, and his mastery of prosody -- these qualities make him ever a pleasure to encounter."—Virginia Quarterly Review
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