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Palmer
RM Francis
Review by Francis Sheppard
This is more than a collection. It is an account of a year, though with its beginning in late winter, its culmination in December. A palmer is one who has completed a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. In this case, the journey is one from death to birth – the obverse of the New Testament story. For RM Francis, it is the journeying self that experiences the scriptural narrative, through buildings that are as medieval and Anglo-Catholic as the rosary beads in constant reference. Referred to frequently is the fine 19th-century church architecture that surrounds us here in the Black Country. And no less to modernity, the Christian Life Complex in medieval Oxford. (Red Kite )
The story told in these 33 pages is one of awareness growing, of a nascent spiritual life engendered by physical surround – a kiss to a baby’s head, a child’s lost glove, and in imagination, a length of cloth that is both marital bedsheet and shroud.
Rooted in the lives of the saints of the first millennium, there are suggestions of love that may take different forms, in a world that is alive with other people.
Behind this tale of incipient fatherhood and the agony of birth – sits the great eternal story of spiritual desolation that is followed by death, and resurrection. The final nativity brings the assurance of the physical processes of which we all are a part. Life will be perpetuated.
Ash Wednesday seems most to embrace the ideas of love, death and renewal prevalent in this collection. The ‘ash’ is not only the mark that believers wear on their foreheads at the outset of the season. The voice in the poem is interchangeably of the 21st century – and the first, that of Jesus Christ, who contemplates his own death from the deserts of his 40-day fast, and who realises the power he has to ‘shift bread to stones’. Just as his counterpart from our days has the free-will to have ‘pleased myself by giving up caffeine’, both are held by the eternal instruction: ‘Come on, Son. Come on now, Son.’
It’s a poem that cannot yet speak of the hopeful aspirations of Easter. Lent is a time when flames ‘flicker on dust’, where ‘… the ashes of things, folded in fertile and fault-soaked sands, harden…’ – recalling perhaps RM Francis’ native Black Country, the fossil-bearing limestone ridge above Dudley, the seams imprinted by long-extinct life from aeons ago. The stanza also recalls the nesting birds, precarious as our own lives on the cliff-face, a feature of the geological phenomenon that is the Wren’s Nest.
On this, the address to the reader appears to turn. What follows is the narrative of the ‘old minister’ (Friar Laurence maybe, from Romeo and Juliet ) who faces torture and death for his bold act in ‘secretly binding lovers’. Here is St Valentine, twice presented so far in the poem – in the title and in ‘valens worth of Lenten’ – the idea that love may endure, even beyond death. The ‘ashen finger’ and ‘ashen touch’ not only denote Christ’s fate to die on the cross, but also what the figure represents to some – a healing life-giving power. Awaiting death, a prisoner is asked to ‘raptor my girl’s eyesight’. A preceding poem, Red Kite, channels Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Windhover, where the bird is similarly a divine presence, that ‘raptors’ the lives lived in the city below, the disappointed life of the former Cowley car-worker, the loss of hope of the east European immigrant among the ‘vodka and scratch-cards’ – quite as much those dwellers in Oxford’s wealthier Radcliffe Road, where ‘cider dreams’ are slept away in the place of dreams that are real and good.
RM Francis’ acknowledgment of the mystery that resides in places of worship, of communality among people, in a baby being born, in motherhood, in fatherhood – informs this collection. The writer’s palmer pilgrimage is one of sudden realisation of what may lie behind this confusion of living that we experience. The book is a weaving of widely-drawn insights, sometimes needing external referencing – though often we are content with the spare beauty of the lines, and the deep resonances they work in us. Published ahead of the 2026 season of Lent, the verses encourage us to ‘trust, wait, hope’ that we may still rise to moments of grace.
