[Robert Francis's Collected Poems exhibits] clearly the achievement of an exceptional, if infrequently honored, craftsman….

Francis's poems, like the athletes he often writes about and whose superior form he imitates, are firm, clean, and graceful. In "Pitcher," one of his best-known poems, Francis might be describing himself: "He / Throws to be a moment misunderstood. / Yet not too much. Not errant, arrant, wild, / But every seeming aberration willed. /"…

There is often a sense of the inevitability of fate in these poems, events or lives working themselves out and revealing what has to be. Elemental questions are posed with a kind of sureness, the speaker confident, yet never smug about where the answers lie. At their best, things achieve a balance between freedom and conformity…. (p. 441)

Such mysteries are the subject of Francis's best poems, in a style that recognizes a need for tradition and experimentation, sometimes rhyming, sometimes not...