About the Author

A nationally acclaimed poet, Robert Francis was awarded the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1984 for "distinguished poetic achievement." His other honors include the Rome Prize Fellowship given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Shelley Award of the Poetry Society of America, the Golden Rose Award of the New England Poetry Club, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, and the Brandeis Creative Arts Award. The University of Massachusetts Press named its annual Juniper Prize in honor of Francis, who for many years lived at Fort Juniper in Amherst.

Reviews

"Brings together seven earlier collections of poetry by Robert Francis, a brilliant and neglected New England poet who is beginning to achieve the recognition he deserves. The Collected Poems, along with his autobiography, The Trouble with Francis (1971), belongs in every academic library."--Choice "Francis is a modern American classic, better (say) than almost anyone who has been gifted with a Pulitzer or a National Book Award in recent decades. I claim him as better (say) than John Berryman or Robert Penn Warren or Delmore Schwartz or A. R. Ammons, and these people have written beautiful poems. As with Hardy, as with Frost, as with Richard Wilbur who has learned from him, Francis must be read in bulk. He does not write big poems. The accrual of small triumphs -- told in the same skeptical, tender, funny, and reticent language -- makes a big poem out of this Collected Poems."--Donald Hall, Ohio Review "Francis's lean puritan wit, his impishness, his insatiable meddling with forms and tones and voices which few poets of our era match, his homegrown nonconformity to any school of poetry, and his mastery of prosody -- these qualities make him ever a pleasure to encounter."--Virginia Quarterly Review