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]

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]

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]

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.

[Anthony Peter]

This collection by Matthew Francis is a poet's interpretation of Mandeville's Travels, a fantastical travelogue dated to 1371, but thought to be based on traveller's tales generally available in Europe during the fourteenth century. The poet chooses features of Mandeville that follow the chronology of the original, but which, presumably, particularly stirred his recreative imagination.

The sequence is, let us say, circumnavigational, though conducted both by sea and by land. It covers such topics as 'Of Storms', 'Of Foreign Tongues', 'Of the West Sea', 'Of the Phoenix', 'Of the Sea of Galilee', 'Of Pepper', 'Of Ants that Dig for Gold', 'Of the Ceremonies of the Great Khan' et al.

The entire collection is written in unrhymed three-line stanzas. Every line is 13 syllables long. This discipline I liked: it gives the varied whole a regular structure, and seemed to me to generate a rhythm and style that is engagingly idiosyncratic and consistent: and it is marvellously clear. It's not so much a what-you-see-is-what-you-get narrative as a what-you-see-will-make-you-wonder account of the possibilities the world presents the intrepid traveller, whether that traveller be a literal one or a hearthside one. Moments of reflection or gentle stimuli to the imagination present themselves as well:

"...I know only
that never before or since have I been so devout."

"... 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."

"As you wake from one India into another,
the dream animals shimmer and swim into new shapes.
Yet they are real. God made them. They must mean something."

"... Believe me.
What I have said is true, or as good as, or was once."

These examples give a flavour of the pace and the rhythm of the whole. I think, however, what I was most - and let me sound just a little pretentious - intoxicated by was the startling clarity of Francis' descriptive diction. I will offer you two fairly randomly chosen examples:

"Viziers, caliphs, nizams were killed in their ambushes,
their litters capsized, their guards thrown over the edge.
These men kept stabbing as the blood ran from their death-wounds." (Of Assassins)

"And when you enter the castle and kneel before him,
do not be afraid of the men with their drawn swords raised,
ready to strike off your head, but speak respectfully,

tell him you wish to see St Catherine and Mount Sinai,
as a pilgrim should, and ask leave to cross his desert.
Mention the name of Mandeville. He will remember." (Of Egypt)

A collection of wonders. As you can tell, I loved it. I'm 74; I almost hate to say it, but I've had my fill of 'difficult', challenging poetry; I want wonder.

[Colin]

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.

[Katerina🤍]

An immersive and vivid telling of adventure and navigation.

[Tasha]

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...