Review of The Mabinogi, by Matthew Francis, pub. Faber 2017

[sheenaghpugh]

Everything seemed to have been torn from its roots,
so that it tumbled over the mind
as in a dream: pigs, seaweed,
birds, people, flowers.

Perhaps that's what he meant by Unland,
a country where things break loose
from their own being.

The storyteller goes on,
as if to himself.

In his introduction to this poetic re-imagining of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, Matthew Francis remarks that the nearest thing to a hero in the original is Pryderi, which is true. But in this version, a far more important character is Gwydion, the magician who is described (again in the original) as the world's greatest storyteller, and whom Francis casts as the narrator of the Fourth Branch. For above anything, what Francis has done here is to recreate the immediacy these tales must have had before they were pinned down in writing, when they were spoken by a storyteller who might at any moment shift an emphasis, drop or add material, or see a character in a new way and make the audience do so. It isn't often that a collection of poems is, literally, a page-turner, where the lure of "what happens next" will not let you stop reading, but it is so here, and I know the actual stories well. But knowing them doesn't mean you know what happens next, because every storyteller puts his own slant on the material, highlighting bits that others leave in darkness. How it actually feels to be a giant like Bran:

the wind in his ears

that his friends must shout to compete with,
a life lived in the weather –
no house will hold him.

He is closer to the birds
than his family.

Or the way something seen from a distance becomes all manner of things before resolving into what it actually is:

a horse with a lick of sunlight on its back,
a horse with a knight in gilt armour,
a horse with a splash of silk
horsewoman riding,

not so much moving as sharpening.

It is, as much as anything, Francis's unusually "sharp" vision, and his eye and ear for a telling image, that give these poems the clarity and colour of a mediaeval manuscript, an effect heightened by the happy device of including the kind of marginal notes you might find in a Bible. These also give some play to his humour, a quality in evidence throughout the collection, as in his description of pigs:

a herd of animals
with small eyes, harrumphing speech
and babyish smiles.

The magic, the constant transitions between the real world and the Otherworld (Unworld, as Francis calls it) come over particularly strongly. It is true, as he says in the Introduction, that "poetry has never had much of a problem with magic. Poets spend their lives transforming things into other things". But it is true too that not all poets could take alternative realities as much in their playful stride as he does, and that part of the reason the magic works is that he treats giant baby-snatching claws, necromancers' wives masquerading as mice, and horses made of mushrooms as perfectly normal, something you might well come across when wandering in so elemental and history-haunted a place as Dyfed. At least, you might if you were as open to possibilities as this writer.

Like all the best storytellers, Francis has love and respect for his source material without feeling bound by previous versions of it. He has shaped, re-ordered, sometimes altered, as the early oral storytellers must surely have done, regarding their material as alive and full of potential rather than a dead, immutable text on a page. Nothing kills a story like treating it with reverence, and his refusal to do so is why his version feels live, fresh, new. I would love to hear these poems read aloud, and I doubt any audience would willingly let the teller stop until the tale was done.

Every so often, I've asserted that if some Francis collection doesn't win an award, the judges must be idiots, and every time, it turns out they are. I've begun to wonder if his work is perhaps not miserable enough to please judges. He is certainly a "serious" poet in that he writes of serious matters, but he does it with humour and a constant delight in the variety and wonder of the world. It is this delight which comes over most strongly from these poems, and which will tempt most readers back into them.