Before opening this new volume of poems by a man who many believe was one of America's finest poets when he died in 1987, the reader might want to look at the back of the dustjacket.

There, in a two by three-and-a-half inch photograph, is the face of Robert Francis, his head angled, staring out at us from behind and between a woman at the left, only a slice of her face and hair revealed, and, to the right, a small part of a furrowed brow that would seem to be a man's. What on earth is this generally circumspect, sage poet doing? Is he sneaking a look at something? At us? What do the parted lips want to say—something wry? Or is his look one of surprise, as if he had been caught in the middle of mischief? And what is on the lower part of his cheek—a mosquito? Up on her six legs, her piercing, multineedled tube thrust into his flesh? Drawing his blood, even as we watch?

As I studied this tantalizing photo I became aware that it contained the elements of a Francis poem, a poem in which all manner of unlikely things can be included and somehow be made to connect with an exquisiteness and irony, as well as marked with a tension born of a very calculated silence. Francis was a master at knowing what to leave out of a poem and what only to suggest.

He was so thoroughly a poet, in fact, as we know from his seven previous volumes of poems, his autobiography (The Trouble with Francis), and selections from his journals (Traveling in Amherst), the photo might lead some of us to conclude playfully that here he has turned himself into a poem.

Francis tells us as much as he plans to about the mystery. Facing the same photo that appears on the dustjacket is “Paradox,” the final poem in the book:

A raspberry often
hides itself even
while publicizing itself.
Red deep red
yes, but half-
concealed in leaves.
What raspberry picker
does not know
the teasing paradox?
The same paradox
that I myself
(forgive me) am.

Some of the poems in this very welcome book, selected from work composed over the period of the 1940s to the 80s, stand among Francis's best. Henry Lyman—of public radio's “Poems to a Listener” fame and himself a poet—assisted Francis in making the selection and arrangement of the poems. “Robert's whole hand was in it,” Lyman assures us.

The broad time-range in which the poems were written reveals interesting differences of technique and form. This enhances the collection, for we have poems which Francis described in his autobiography as “quiet, brooding, even melancholy, the month seemingly November, the color gray,” and also those newer ones, which he rightly saw as possessing “color, energy, action,” the result of his growing older and wanting “to call up, like a magician, the vitality and exuberance of youth.”

There are examples here of his word-count poems, of poems highly rhymed, not-so-rhymed and not rhymed at all, of poems lacking all punctuation. But almost always there is the “intensive interplay of words” by a poet who could not have believed more passionately that “two words lying side by side on the page [can] … breed wonders.” And a poet who also gave the word, peppermint, for example, new meaning, as in the poem, “The Old Peppermint Ladies”:

Nobody ever called it a presumption
A white peppermint in church
A white peppermint on a warm sabbath
The peppermint being both warm and cool
But that was long ago, the peppermints
Are gone and all the old peppermint ladies
With their palmleaf fans, their folding fans
I presume so, I presume so
Their Psalms, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes,
Their folded hands.

When one has read these poems by Francis, it is not necessary to read also Marianne Moore's quotation beneath that dustjacket picture: “He is so penetrating, delicate, and wise, one goes away without having said a word, merely grateful to have received so much.”