Blizzard

Winner of the Southern Arts Prize and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

The poems in Matthew Francis's first collection range from the light-hearted to the unsettling, from lyrical and witty evocations of landscape and domestic life to narratives of apocalypse and surreal fantasy. Night and winter provide the dominant metaphors, but, from this material, Francis, whose technical adroitness and flair for storytelling are equally remarkable, conjures up a substantial...