SOURCE: “Of Bulldozers and Bees,” in Christian Science Monitor, Vol. 66, No. 149, June 26, 1974, p. F4.

In the following review, Howes offers a favorable assessment of Like Ghosts of Eagles, particularly praising Francis's poems of nature.

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 his fifth book of poems, 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 sees how earth “takes her time / all man's perdurable fabrications / his structural steel, his factories, his forts / his moon...