Shortlisted for the 2018 Wales Book of the Year Award | Shorlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 2017

Following the success of Muscovy (2013), acclaimed poet Matthew Francis turns to medieval Wales in his latest collection. Steeping himself in the four loosely linked ‘branches’ or prose tales of the Mabinogi, he boldly reimagines the sequence for the modern reader. Following closely the structure of the original Middle Welsh texts, in these poems he plunges the reader into a strange world, full of drama and magic, yet precisely located in the authentic geography of Wales, where climbing a hill or crossing an unseen boundary can lead imperceptibly into an otherworld governed by different rules and powers.

In poems of great immediacy Francis draws us into the skin of men and women of a distant, mysterious yet curiously familiar world, all our senses awoken to its sounds, smells, colours, joys and tensions. We witness a woman accused of infanticide, or married into a foreign court and seeking rescue from humiliation and exile, magicians who conjure a woman from wild flowers or send an army of mice to devastate an enemy’s crops – a host of unforgettable characters inseparable from the land from which they spring. Full of suspense but leavened with characteristically playful touches, these absorbing and atmospheric poetic narratives will enchant and move the reader.