The verse of Robert Francis is like a small, sun-warmed stone, smooth to the touch, pleasant to handle, and as you hold it, releasing a hidden inner warmth.

[In Like Ghosts of Eagles] he writes of mountain and water, of permanence and change, of what it is to forget and what it is to remember. Francis is a poet of seasons, the seasons men keep in their comings and goings over the face of the earth.

He takes the long view, the focus of his camera eye being set just short of infinity….

He is sober but not somber, delighting to play the games language plays with us—"The bulldozer / bulls by day / And dozes by night. / Would that the dulldozer / Dozed all the time."…

Like Robert Frost, his friend and an acknowledged mentor, Robert Francis learns many of his best poems by studying nature up close, collecting...