Matthew Francis, The Green Month (Faber, 2025)

Matthew Francis’s The Green Month is a free-standing sequence of poems based on the work of the acclaimed medieval Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym. It follows on from his achievement of creating a successful poetic English version of the fourteenth-century Welsh epic The Mabinogi in 2017. As Francis explains in his preface, it would be difficult – if not impossible – to render ap Gwilym’s formal ingenuity in Welsh into English and so he opts instead for the pressure of a diminishing stanzaic form for all the poems in the sequence – not as an equivalence, but to offer some sense of how the poems depend on formal restraint. This aids Francis’s championing of ap Gwilym as a male love poet whose playful portrayal in the poems as someone pointedly lacking in sexual restraint makes him our contemporary. Francis values highly the self-mocking and self-diminishing capacity of the Welsh poet’s presentation of a licentious, sexually promiscuous self. This archly susceptible male figure belongs to the robust tradition of the fabliaux and in similar fashion depends upon the juxtaposition of a sophisticated mastery of form (and knowledge) with rustic earthiness.

To my mind, the contemporary charm of the sequence lies in the way the figure of the susceptible poet is integrated into his pastoral setting and in his strong sense of how his misadventures are dependent upon the seasons and the other species present in the landscape of rural medieval Wales. This turns The Green Month into ...