“Absences”
David C. Ward, PN Review 172, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 68-69 (November-December, 2006)

Matthew Francis’s Whereabouts is one of the more nicely designed small books of poetry that I can recall: excellent paper, crisp printing and layout, and the decorative accent of a sublimated image repeating the first letter of each poem’s title. This care is not accidental since typography is essential to Whereabouts’ structure. Francis’s thirty-five poems are all identically structured, consisting of three stanzas of descending lines – three, two, one – arranged on an identical (roughly) syllabic template: 13 or 12, 11, 7/ / 5, 5 / /  4. I say ‘roughly’ because the syllables are sounded instead of counted in order to make up the pattern; for instance, in the last line of ‘Starlings’ – ‘of the thronged roost’ – ‘thronged’ is read as one syllable to make the line count four and the first lines vary a bit. The effect of all this is quite pleasing visually and the descending or narrowing down of the stanzas allows Francis to the circle in and pinpoint the ‘where’ in the ‘whereabouts’ of each of his poems.

There is nothing archly self-conscious or game-like in Francis’s fabrication of his self-set template; this isn’t light verse that makes a technical point by sacrificing meaning and heft. Francis uses structural limits and boundaries to push verbally towards at least a provisional pinning down of his subject. Francis is a poet of location – he sights in on a subject: the moon, a jetty, a building – but it is a pleasingly paradoxical effect of his structurings that his poems then zero in not necessarily on a physical detail but rise to the evocation of a mood. For instance, here is ‘Dawn Walk’ in its lovely entirety:

There was no sunrise that morning, only the fade-in
of daylight, and the mist shuffling off the prom.
A man fed gulls from a bag.

Not the start of something,
more like the white space

after the words.

This weaving from absence (no sunrise) to the particular (morning) to the specific (the prom) to anonymous, aimless dailiness (gull feeding) to the emptiness of the landscape and then a redoubled sense of hollowness by the evocation of human mood is really quite artfully done: the problem with nothingness is that it is always about something.

A subject like a dawn walk invites a sense of melancholy from the poet, but while Francis is quiet, he varies his tone and frequently is dryly witty in a way that is not light or Collinsesque. A poem call ‘Louvre Pyramid’ talks about the French love of geometry, attributes that fondness indirectly to the Enlightenment’s fondness for transparent order and ends with the salient political point: ‘The walls are clear to show / no one has hidden / / a king inside’. ‘Party’ ends as parties do: ‘Root gently through the bed’s / layered coats in case / / you unearth friends’. Here again Francis opens up a new subject just as he finishes the description of another. In ‘Moon’ he makes this point through typography, beginning with ‘)’ to show the moon at its lowest ebb and then its progression – which is actually ‘backward mouthings’, dialectical paradox again! – to ‘where they should have begun: / an opening smile, / / a pause of dark. (‘ Even here Francis’s concern with typography leads to a doubleness that opens up a new subject as the sliver of the moon’s parenthesis, a smile, is the text-messaging emoticon for sadness.

Poets like to experiment or fiddle around with forms but I haven’t seen anyone who has consistently used a specific format to such imaginative and surprising effect as Francis does in Whereabouts. Although not as formalistically heroic as a crown of sonnets or a book of villanelles, there is something about Francis’s quiet architecture that speaks to our sense of our diminished or constricted selves. The way in which Francis navigates through the strictures of his form, doubling and tripling meanings as he goes, is not just astonishingly virtuosic but moving: he is a poetic Houdini, escaping into a locked box in order to liberate his subject self.