I bless the grindstone of your voice

Stephen Payne reviews 'The Green Month', by Matthew Francis (Faber 2025)

Geese

We had the hall to ourselves as I sat fingering
the trinkets of firelight trembling on her skin.
I told her I ached from my journey
and other things. When she smiled
the night went berserk

with footsteps and shouting, the steel shriek of a drawn sword.
I knew the sounds of an encroaching husband
and fled, searching the crannies of shadow
for the outline of a door.
Here it was at last.

I squeezed into a cupboard of feathery scuffles.
The place was spitting with geese that grabbed at me
with the toothless pliers of their beaks
like so much angry bedding.
Husbands are gentler.

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‘Geese’ is from The Green Month by Matthew Francis (Faber, 2025) — big thanks to Faber for letting us reproduce it here.

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Among this collection’s unusual features is that it begins with an interesting, breezy ‘Introduction’ by the author, which serves as both a brief primer on the medieval Welsh poet, Dafydd ap Gwilym and a defence of Francis’s strategies in producing these 40 poems. We learn that ap Gwilym’s main themes include “male heterosexual desire” and “comic sexual failure”. We learn about ap Gwilym’s affairs, one with a married woman, Morfudd, and how he used the natural world as source of images for his poems to her, perhaps in part because the wooded glade was their bedroom, for in his time, “if you wanted to make love in secret, it was necessary to go outside”. We learn that ap Gwilym’s poetry is playful, self-effacing and humorous and that Francis can well mirror these aspects in his own writing.

Looking at the poem ‘Geese’, we immediately see two distinctive features that are shared by all of Francis’s poems in this collection. It is titled by a single noun and it is arranged in three stanzas of what Francis calls “tapered syllabics” – lines of 13, 11, 9, 7 and 5 syllables. This makes a poem of 135 syllables in total, which is just 5 syllables short of classic sonnet length, lending some familiarity to this unusual form.

I’ll return to the syllabic form, but more important, I would argue, is the liveliness and compression that characterise this poem, and all the poems collected here. There’s a very high density of poetic effects – images, metaphors – but despite this, a wittiness and a lightness of touch that makes the work easy to appreciate and relish.

In the first stanza, there’s the risqué use of “fingering” and its lyrical completion after the line-break. There’s the ribaldry, again, of “and other things” and, again, this is emphasised by the line-break before it. There’s the doubled meaning of the night going berserk, first with desire then, after the enjambed stanza-break, with the noisy arrival of the husband. In the last stanza there’s the quick-mixing of metaphors for the violent geese, the “toothless pliers of their beaks” and the marvellously displaced “angry bedding”.

If we compare ‘Geese’ with the poem on which it was based, we uncover more of Francis’s strategy. (To my shame, I’m not a Welsh speaker, and in making these comparisons I’m relying on the texts and literal English translations of dafyddapgwillym.net, which Francis himself has leaned on.) ‘Y Cwt Gwyddau’ (‘The Goose Shed’) is 44 lines of old Welsh (most lines are 7 syllables) and end-rhymed in couplets, with additional internal rhymes. Obviously, much is omitted from Francis’s abridged version. More surprisingly, perhaps, many of the most inventive and pleasing figures in ‘Geese’ are Francis’s own. This is true of most, perhaps all, of these versions. What is preserved is, primarily, plot, setting and, I think, tone (if I can assume tone is preserved in the literal translation I’m looking at). Even ‘version’ might overstate the relation with the original: ‘Geese’ is certainly after ‘The Goose Shed’, but I might almost think of it as an ekphrastic piece, in which the inspirational artwork happens itself to be a poem.

Returning to the Introduction, it’s now clear why Francis would wish to be so explicit about his method. He’s keen to admit the distance between his poems and those on which they are based. As well as remarks about translation, he makes some very particular points about form, and about how important he felt it to work in some form, even if one “not nearly as demanding as traditional Welsh prosody”.

It seems to me that unrhymed syllabic forms, including Francis’s tapered stanza, are more salient for the writer than they are for the reader. Syllabic patterns aren’t as perceptible in English as stress-based metres. I doubt if I would have noticed if any of the longer lines had slipped or gained a couple of syllables. Of course, one notices the shape on the page. Francis says that, for him, the tapered stanza would “squeeze the verse, forcing me to be more economical as I go on”, but this effect wasn’t apparent to me as a reader, and I would have thought it would depend on sentence-length, which is not at all constrained to reduce in correlation with line-length through the stanza. I do agree, though, that making each poem the same shape and length is “a more severe constraint than the stanza itself”, and I very much admire the economy and inventiveness this has evidently provoked.

I could find phrases, sentences and stanzas to pick out and celebrate in any of these poems. As a second example, consider ‘Crow’, Francis’s version of ‘Y Fran’. The first stanza is characteristically image-rich, and introduces the crow as widely disliked and persecuted, preparing us for the contrary admiration that the poem espouses:

Bird made of shadow, you fly across the sun
as your other self is darkening the grass,
and people shiver at your passing.
We frighten you in return
with a man of sticks.

Neither the shadow nor the scarecrow appears in ‘Y Fran’. The poem moves on to praise the crow: “But I bless the grindstone of your voice”. (Ad Gywillym’s blessing mentions instead that the crow announces the coming of day, among other qualities.)

And if I’m allowed to quote one more whole stanza by way of advertisement, I will choose ‘Heart’, perhaps ap Gwilym’s second favourite body part. The middle stanza goes like this, expressing the irresistible idea that the heart has “no head for drink”, and allowing this review to close on an exclamation mark:

I’m tired of carrying you. You have no head for drink
and the smile of a girl sets you off again,
a foxhound scrabbling to be let out.
They say you’re made for loving —
you’re addled enough!

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Stephen Payne is Professor Emeritus at the University of Bath, where until September 2020 he taught and conducted research in Cognitive Science. He lives in Penarth in the Vale of Glamorgan. His first full-length poetry collection, Pattern Beyond Chance, was published by HappenStance Press in 2015 and shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year. His second collection, The Windmill Proof (2021), and a pamphlet The Wax Argument & Other Thought Experiments (2022) were published by the same press. Stephen Payne’s website is here, and he blogs here.

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