Mandeville

by Matthew Francis

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville was one of the most popular books of the later Middle Ages. Purporting to describe the circumnavigation of an English knight through Africa, India, and the Middle East in 1322, the narrative is a fantastical collection of sights: seas, islands, phoenixes, pyramids, rocks that enchant ships and apes that contain human souls, interwoven with geographical descriptions that are perfectly accurate. Matthew Francis's new collection is a sequence of poems that celebrate and give voice to Mandeville, in his own words, caught as he is between physical and symbolic geographies, between a world that is round and one that has Jerusalem at its centre. And all of it narrated in the terse, solitary, conflicted and strangely passionate voice of this medieval Crusoe whose very existence was disputed.

Genres: Poetry

53 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Sheenagh Pugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

You can't flick through this collection browsing here and there, as you can with most. You really do have to read it in order, like a narrative, because it mirrors Sir John Mandeville's highly coloured 14th-century account of his world travels.

Now I know subject matter shouldn't make a difference, it should all be about the poet's skill. But the fact is, some subject matter really is more attractive than others - if we are going to immerse ourselves in a fictional world, it might as well be one we find congenial - and with me, tall travellers' tales are always going to win out over, say, confessional poems or misery memoirs. Who wouldn't want to hear about the Cairo Incubator and the way the excessive greenery in Egypt crystallises into a glut of emeralds? (I did say they were tall tales).

But in the end, the main recommendation of this collection is indeed Francis's skill with words. This fictional travelogue is all about new ways of seeing and re-creating the world - from the start, where he describes sleeping on board ship "while the night is lifted and dropped with you inside it". This wonderful inventiveness with words and ideas never fails him. "Of Islands" ends:

Islands and stories. Every time you arrive, you think
how it would feel to pull the sea around you at night,
except that the next land floats in the distance, waiting.

It was an old pirate saying that there were always "other islands, further on" and something of the enterprise and inspiration of those irresistible reprobates lives in this collection. I found it genuinely exciting to read, unputdownable in the way that poetry collections so frequently aren't. Mandeville's voice convinces all through it - well, convinces in the way that an adept con artist does, for though you are always aware that the information he imparts is fanciful, the voice in which it is uttered is very real.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful evocation of a late-medieval traveller, Sir John Mandeville - not a gap-year more a gap-life! - who ventures from little England to the far horizons, physically, mentally & emotionally. His encounters with the extraordinary & fantastical are beautifully captured in easy-flowing verses which delight the poetic palette with a rich rainbow of images & imaginings. Matthew Francis displays no jarring idiosyncrasies in his poetic revelations; his style is mellifluous & flavoursome,bringing a smile to the eyes & a warm embrace to the soul of any reader with half a mind. Recommended to those who like to go to places as yet unimagined....

[Toby · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is simply a superb little collection of poems that took me the best part of a month to read through because every poem deserves two or three readings. Francis has a feel and felicity for language that is quite unusual, having an ability through the choice of one word to root a stanza or a sentiment in the heart of the reader.

The poems, written (in form, if not rhyme) as Terza Rima have an exotic feel to them - like a translation of Dante, whose influence is certainly present, not least in Of the Vale Perilous. But the language is wonderfully Anglo-Saxon in its simplicity and onomatopoeia.

I've not read anything quite like this before.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville first appeared in French in the late fourteenth century and became one of the most popular books of the period. So little is known about the eponymous traveller that it is quite possible he never existed and that the Travels were cobbled together from a variety of manuscript sources. Whatever the truth about Sir John, his experiences of the wider world, real or imagined, touched a nerve in the medieval psyche. Matthew Francis’s reimagining of Mandeville’s journey is a little gem of a book, combining wide-eyed wonder at the world, an understanding of the rigours of the road and a believable medieval sensibility. Oddly enough, in its remarkable ability to look at new things for the first time, it reminded me of the so-called Martian school of poetry.

[Tasha · Rating 2 out of 5]

In Francis' collection there are lots of avenues. The imagery is often luxurious, at time's sufocatingly rich such as in Of Circumnavigation where the reader is traded between lands along with 'wool for spices, grey sea for blue, our brass for gold', to the point where the reader becomes almost travel blind with description.

Full review: http://natashaborton.blogspot.co.uk/2...