Carrie Etter, Times Literary Supplement (July 21, 2006)

Matthew Francis's third book of poetry, Whereabouts, is an auspicious start for the Canadian small press Rufus Books. Its title well indicates its idea of place as unfixed, made elusive as much by close inspection as by the changes of weather and season. Each poem's observation of a single element of an environment complements this uncertainty, as the simple act of looking approaches the quiddity of the observed, as well as opening up its potential into unexpected territory.

To frame and concentrate these acts of attention, Francis has developed his own short form. Each of the thirty-five poems consists of six lines, in stanzas of three, two and one line; moreover, each poem follows a 13-10-7-6-5-4 syllable scheme. The form, and Francis's often whimsical lyricism, give the volume its delicate coherence, while the poems' titles indicate the range of locations Whereabouts considers, including "Indoor Market, Cardiff", "Urban Sunset", and "Tallinn, June", and their inhabitants, from spiders and cats to bullfrogs and pigs' heads.

Part of the pleasure of the book comes from the freshness of the poems' observations, such as a spider's "dry / posy of legs", the determination in a dead animal's stillness, and dogwood trees each "adrift in its // vanilla float", to name only a few. The more particular interest of the collection arises from the sense of a positive instability in the world, in natural change and shifting perspectives. A shrimp caught in a shadowed rockpool perceives "how dark its world / has become, but not // how much it's shrunk", and even though the sea fails to remove "scraps, ribbons and nodules" from a strand, "walking on / its just-emerged shine, // it could be new".