SOURCE: “Color, Energy, Action,” in Sewanee Review, Vol. 102, No. 1, January, 1994, pp. xi-xiii.

In the following review, Gillmann provides a favorable assessment of Francis's collection Late Fire, Late Snow.

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...