Mandeville

Description

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville was one of the most popular books of the later Middle Ages, and its author was described centuries after by Sir Thomas Browne as 'the greatest liar of all time'. Purporting to describe the circumnavigation of an English knight through Africa, India and the Middle East in 1322, the narrative tells of many wonders: of islands whose inhabitants have the bodies of humans but the heads of dogs, of a tribe whose only source of nourishment is the smell of apples, of a race of one-eyed giants . . . The fantastical is interwoven, moreover, with geographical descriptions that are perfectly accurate. Matthew Francis's new collection is a sequence of poems that celebrate and gives voice to Mandeville, in his own words, caught as he is between physical and symbolic geographies, between a world that is round and one that has Jerusalem at its centre. The poems quietly probe different aspects of the voyage, exploring the anthropology of lies, the paradoxes of belief, and the all-too-human dilemmas of curiosity. Here are seas, storms, inns, islands, phoenixes, pyramids, rocks that enchant ships, apes that contain human souls. And all of it narrated in the terse, solitary, conflicted and strangely passionate voice of this medieval Crusoe whose very existence was disputed: 'I, Sir John Mandeville.'

Matthew Francis is the author of two Faber collections, Blizzard and Dragons, both shortlisted for the Forward Prize, and editor of W. S. Graham's New Collected Poems. He has also published a study of Graham, Where the People Are, and a novel, WHOM. in 2004 he was named as one of the Next Generation Poets. He is Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and lives in West Wales with his wife, Creina.