Matthew Francis

Wing

W. S. Graham

W. S. Graham - New Collected Poems

The Mabinogi

Philo Nockby lives in the year 2019, but before the world falls apart, he is suddenly brought to the year 3451 to train in becoming a historical agent who travels through time. He and his new friends, Raelyn, Alani, and Xendo, must juggle their coursework at the Superior Institute of Young Trioka while dealing with the growing political tensions of an upcoming global election. When mysterious intruders plant a toxic bomb at SIYT that kills its victims within hours, a perilous race begins to secure an antidote while students struggle to survive.

PRAX and the Hazardous Countdown

William Sydney Graham (1918–1986) is increasingly acknowledged as one of the most important British poets of the twentieth century. In playful but profound exercises in self-reflexivity, such as ‘Implements in their Places’ and ‘What is the Language Using Us for?’, he lays down a challenge to his readers which this book takes up. What exactly is he saying about language, and how are his concerns related to the apparently similar ones of postmodern theory? Matthew Francis offers a surprising answer: the theme of language in the poems is inextricable from that of community. Writing, for Graham, must always justify itself in terms of an idealized model of community based on his working-class Clydeside childhood. His work is haunted by guilt: in becoming a writer he felt he had betrayed his family and background. He attempts to assuage this by means of an ingenious metaphor that presents language itself as a community.Francis traces the development of this metaphor from the experimentalism of the early poems through the complexities of Graham’s most ambitious poem, ‘The Nightfishing’, to the subtlety and daring of the late work. Finally, he looks at some intriguing unpublished writings, and shows that their resistance to closure and dalliance with automatism are further attempts to solve this problem. Here as elsewhere, Graham’s brilliant rhetoric and deep insight into language are products of a quest for a mythical linguistic community, ‘where the people are’.

Language and Community in the Poetry of W.S. Graham

Where the People are

Kim Knott

Religions are at their core about creating certainty. But what happens when groups lose control of their destiny? Whether it leads to violence, or to nonviolent innovations, as found in minority religions following the death of their founders or leaders, uncertainty and insecurity can lead to great change in the mission and even teachings of religious groups. This book brings together an international range of contributors to explore the uncertainty faced by new and minority religious movements as well as non-religious fringe groups. The groups considered in the book span a range of religious traditions (Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam), old and new spiritual formations such as esotericism, New Age and organized new religious movements, as well as non-religious movements including the straight edge movement and the British Union of Fascists. The chapters deal with a variety of contexts, from the UK and US, to Japan and Egypt, with others discussing global movements. While all the authors deal with twentieth- and twenty-first-century movements and issues, several focus explicitly on historical cases or change over time. This wide-ranging, yet cohesive volume will be of great interest to scholars of minority religious movements and non-religious fringe groups working across religious studies, sociology and social psychology.

Minority Religions and Uncertainty

'The Travels of Sir John Mandeville' was one of the most popular books of the later Middle Ages. Matthew Francis's collection is a sequence of poems that celebrate and give voice to Mandeville, caught as he is between physical and symbolic geographies, between a world that is round and one that has Jerusalem at its centre.

Mandeville

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. His 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'.

Th is dramatic adaptation of Jane Austen's first novel wryly dramatizes the disparity between the heroine's fantasy world of Gothic romance and mystery and the real world of England in the 1800s. It also captures Austen's incomparable irony and acerbic comment in witty dialogue and narration.

Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey

Whereabouts

Colder Still

'Here at the turn of the leaf a horseman is riding through the space between one world and another . . .' The Mabinogi is the Welsh national epic, a collection of prose tales of war and enchantment, adventure and romance, which have long fascinated readers all over the world. Matthew Francis's retelling of the first four stories (the Four Branches of the Mabinogi) is the first to situate it in poetry, and captures the magic and strangeness of this medieval Celtic world: a baby is kidnapped by a monstrous claw, a giant wades across the Irish Sea to do battle, a wizard makes a woman out of flowers, only to find she is less biddable than he expected. Permeating the whole sequence is a delight in the power of the imagination to transform human experience into works of tragedy, comedy and wonder. The Mabinogi is an important contribution to the storytelling of the British Isles. 'I have waited a life for this book: our ancient British tales re-told, in English, by a poet, as they were in their original Welsh. This is more than translation. It picks up the harp and sings.' Gillian Clarke

Matthew Francis

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