What I'm Reading this Week: 'Mandeville' by Matthew Francis

I heard Matthew Francis read at the Bodmin Moor Poetry Festival at the end of May, and was unable to resist buying his two most recent poetry collections, Mandeville and Muscovy (both from Faber).

Mandeville is a retelling of the travel tales of the purportedly real, more probably fictional, C14th explorer Sir John Mandeville. In this collection of interlinked poems, Matthew Francis takes us to situations that many travellers would recognise alongside many that they would not. In a foreign inn, the traveller tests his phrasebook:

Give me soup. This wine is bad. What have you put in it?
I am a pilgrim. A merchant. I am lost. Help me.
I am sick. Tired. I am wounded. I have hurt my foot.

And on the road, the familiar is made strange by being in unrecognisable language:

                  ...underneath the sound and look
the meaning of things has changed: road rain tree bird cow man 

broken into pieces and floating before your eyes,
as if it was only the words that held them in place.

As he travels, Mandeville sees things that are more and more amazing: The Land of Darkness, the Amazons, the place where 'the ants are as big as dogs' and dig for gold, and the Gravelly Sea where waves are made of stones

    ...drawn and redrawn on the stillness
as if a field could plough itself, or the desert frown

This book is a fantastical journey, filled with wonderful images, but it is as much about the nature of travel and what it does to us, and the nature of language and how the unfamiliar can set it loose from its own moorings. Definitely worth a read.