Like Ghosts of Eagles

Marianne Moore said of Robert Francis's poetry, He is so penetrating, delicate, and wise, one goes away without having said a word, merely grateful to have received so much. Francis readers will welcome this new volume of verse which features poems in the whole technical gamut of Francis styles, including word count, with which he first delighted critics in Come out into the Sun. Like Ghosts of Eagles also presents for the first time entirely new Francis styles and techniques. Such poems as Bloodstains, Going to the Funeral, and Silent Poem are distinguished by fragmented surface, a technique in which single words or short phrases are delivered without connecting tissue. Also new to his work are poems in which sentences are fused together in one continuous stream, as in The Mountain, The Righteous, and The Peacock. The works are equally diversified in mood, ranging from the bitterly satirical through the elegiac, lyrical and playful, to poems of pure celebration. Few others writing today work with such fragile sounds and with such delicate, almost pastel perceptions, wrote David Clark upon first reading the manuscript of Like Ghosts of Eagles.