[In the following review, Allen provides a favorable assessment of Francis's Come Out into the Sun, expressing the opinion that Francis deserves a wider audience for his poetry.]

Another New Englander, Robert Francis, escaped the past long ago. His new and selected poems confirm his stature. Francis is a poet to be read and reread, a poet who shapes his lines to perfect forms, graceful, unforced balances. Listen to him in “Hogwash”:

What beside sports and flowers could you find
To praise better than the American language?
Bruised by American foreign policy
What shall I soothe me, what defend me with
But a handful of clean unmistakable words—
Daisies, daisies, in a field of daisies?

Or in “The Articles of War”:

Somebody next, who knows? may try
Resigning from the human race,
Somebody aghast at history,
Haunted by hawk's eyes in the human face.
Somebody—could it be I?

or in these lines from “Skier”: “He swings down like the flourish of a pen / Signing a signature in white on white.”

I could quote Francis for pages. I, and many other poets, have been reading him for years—time after time taking out his books and finding in ourselves an emotion akin to love, as we are continually given a needed knowledge of the evenness won out of terrible calm with which he confronts the world. He is a poet who deserves a much wider audience. I hope Come Out into the Sun gains it for him.