Francis, Robert.

A Certain Distance.

Woods Hole, Pourboire Press, 1976. 13 cm x 21 cm. 40 pages. Original Softcover. Very good condition with some minor signs of external wear. From the library of swiss – american – irish poet Chuck Kruger. Note by Kruger on front free endpaper. Occasional markings and annotations.

Contains among others the following poems: Vigiler; The Rock Climbers; Repose; Sebastian; Farm Boy After Summer; Mechanic; Metal and Mettle; Frank; Riddle; Philosopher; Tenor; Heat Wave; In Control; The Base Stealer; Bronze; High Diver etc.

Robert Francis (August 12, 1901; Upland, Pennsylvania – July 13, 1987) was an American poet who lived most of his life in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Robert Francis was born on August 12, 1901 in Upland, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard University in 1923. He would later attend the Graduate School of Education at Harvard where he once said that he felt that he’d come home. He lived in a small house he built himself in 1940, which he called Fort Juniper, near Cushman Village in Amherst, Massachusetts. One of his poetic mentors was Robert Frost, and indeed Francis’s first volume of poems, Stand Here With Me (1936), displays a poetic voice eerily reminiscent of Frost’s own in carefully crafted nature poems. Frost once said: “poetry is the only acceptable way to say one thing and mean another.″
Francis published very little during the 1940s–1950s. He decided that “for better or worse, I was a poet and there was really nothing else for me to do but go on being a poet. It was too late to change even if I had wanted to. Poetry was my most central, intense and inwardly rewarding experience.” In 1960, Francis published The Orb Weaver, which revived his reputation as a poet.

Francis uses hidden meanings in his poems, which suggest another way that Frost made an impression on Francis’s poetry. In later volumes, Francis found a voice distinctively his own, relaxed in meter and characterized by puns, word-plays, slant rhymes, and repetitions of key words. Aside from one long narrative poem in Frostian blank verse, Francis’s poetry consists largely of concise lyrics, somewhat limited in thematic range but intensely crafted and deeply personal. Frost would later say that Robert Francis was America’s best neglected poet. He often wrote about nature and baseball. His autobiography, The Trouble with Francis, was published in 1971 and details his struggle with neglect. Francis died July 13, 1987.

• Keywords: Chuck Kruger Cape Clear Collection
• Language: English
• Inventory Number: 81518AB

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