“Reminiscent of e.e. cummings at his best”, Mario Petrucci’s work is “vivid, generous and life-affirming” (Envoi). His most recent poems, inspired by Black Mountain and hailed as “modernist marvels” (Poetry Book Society), embrace contemporary issues of profound social and personal relevance via a distinctive combination of innovation and humanity. Through groundbreaking residencies, poetry films and a remarkable output of ecopoetry, his unique scientific sensibility has illuminated the linguistic as well as emotive resonances of love and loss in the public and private domains. Whether exploring the tragedies of Chernobyl (Heavy Water, 2004) or immersing himself in heart-rending invention (i tulips, 2010), Petrucci aspires to “Poetry on a geological scale” (Verse).
“The thirty-nine poems of anima bring a distinctive, archetypal potency to the closing stages of Mario Petrucci’s larger i tulips project, the 1111-strong sequence in which this sub-sequence crucially sits.
Arising organically from prior modernist experiment, Petrucci’s style nevertheless remains utterly contemporary. His mastery of the shape and sound of each poem makes for an intense and all-consuming experience, refocusing an array of influences through an acute lyrical sensibility. By yielding so completely to the power of linguistic transformation, these searing, necessary poems capture both the crisis and the beauty of the heart’s innermost voyage.”
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“Mario Petrucci’s anima is a revelation of the underside of a human heart submitting to the contradictions of love, doubt and mortality. This remarkable work reconfigures the soul as well as the mind, through language that shapes the ineffable into a visceral, triumphant poetry.”
– Alexandra Burack
“The tensile delicacy of Petrucci’s lines springs back with a very English baroque, Miltonic surprise: sense-ambush occurs in the next line, skewering what’s gone before. Between these line-breaks rests a declamatory silence tested to snapping. This is major work to cast shadows.”
– Álvaro de Campos, tr. Simon Jenner
“With a brio and tenderness all of their own, these new lyric poems are modernist marvels, word sculptures pared to their very essence… Petrucci’s tulips promise to grow into a truly ambitious landmark body of work.”
– Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Spring 2010
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the machine
step into the machine
they said
& we can take you back
undo each & all regret
the girls the booze that bank
I said
the catch?
that’s for you to choose they said
just get in first &
take it
step by step so I could have had (I
mean could have)
Margaret? no –
better than that the clearest pearl you
never met a flower
a-swirl in mead but
hurry now this power is
expensive & what of illness? mine? no
need for that you’ll be shown
where you mustn’t live look – an open
door sign
here (I cursed) was she then
the one? of many friend you mean
rather than the one I
took? you’re sure? oh
much more than you can know so
meet that hearse
with a silken heart take another
throw…(I’d one leg
in) I said
&
what about
my son?
your son? ah
– nothing to be done nothing
we can do but
there’ll be others just like
him & not unkilled & he’ll never know
you know nor you
I know
now I said (they began to fret the floor
began to slide) we need
answers get
inside don’t make this your biggest
yet I
saw a face
somewhere still at play a door
swept shut
then
disappeared as I whispered
through air distilled
I’ll stay
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for Pablo Neruda (‘Tonight I Can Write…’)
because i have
lost her I hold her gaze in mine
who never loses who sees me under
the bone moon bones in her eyes daze
all love shown in singlest glance nothing
survives other than love what eyes
steady behind a look covered
recovered as one loses a stone
generations passed down on single
fingers regenerations to regain her I
found because I looked & all gazing salt who
think eyes that dance lose translating
flesh to other flesh that thinned
mink a thumbtip brushed in her small
of back or animal between thighs made
heady muse what is never held I cannot
lose as oceans do not hold the dolphin ever
passing through I have her now who
passed in trueness feel her
glide within as certain days become
asides to time as though I were that air emp-
tied leap–stunned over water what waters hide
after dolphins
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room
within
none ever
walked through
walls
unpainted with chords
yellowed
beneath silt
& caught between brick
each ability
to weep
bedded in plaster to cover
notes as
if music
were indicant absence for
what
instruments
never express though this
covert man
is able
sat by a window black
with lateness
halved
in love for all quiets
he cannot
hear
quite pianissimo
through
night
artful with dawn all on
its brink
agape
with the next his very next
beat b-
rushing
that rim outermost in him
ever after
about to
return even as it burns
lock to
key
in the one his
undone
heart
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anima I
cannot write
her straight – this
man in whom straightness is
an arrow curving
its path : mere illusion
for lovers who plot where it arcs
I cannot know
her in this line I draw
back tauter than the string that lets
pain go or
the bow supple in its
bend yet ever prone to warp & send
off-true : so
how may I find a You
where speech is impossible unless
this skimming
of targets be the way
into speaking between a man &
that woman he
started with neither
mother nor wife but She he
squints at
clear through near
-sighted morning as if
her stroke
steady & precise
through him were
all
air ready
to be parted
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O anima
you ran
ahead when magma
was just a girl hurled along masculine
vertebrae to spill her tresses hotly orange
or part in pleasure there &
here her
many yellow
lipsticked mouths – you
blessed the pool where bacteria unthinking
Brownian ways through measured light chose
instead one day to walk &
continents
still fused
hip to shoulder you
smouldered on each southern bed dreamy
with depth & loosely loved where underwater
vents teethed in druse sent
upwards
plumed
biota as campfires do
by gloomy streams & even through reptilian
doom you grew patient for me as the Nile for
sand or that green-brown rind
on crocodiles
you waited
for sun & mind to grow me
with every journey hearse-to-crib become one
slow breath & now i breathe creation in
as though that oxygen were
easy on
these lungs
received through a look
fearlessly ancient from a creature formed
not of rib but water who found at last air &
fire or as bluish Earth in
all its seas
glares in love
upon airier blues or the air
-borne bird ever chooses to keep motionless
its egg or settles in the nest it makes itself
with delicate shivers to rest
within
that perfect
fit – though today i sleep &
skit so sense myself a swallow stalled &
brought too soon to ground who sees thus
calls to your sky moving on
above to
wait for me
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for Hafez
how our stars
fall to heaven not
up
from hell: twinned
flares unseen in op-
position
that dare cross them
selves across the sea
-through
moon in soundless omen
a quick amen in bodied sky
light
swells to bluest child these
plutonic cells uncurtailed
&
indivisibly double this
zygote afternoon that
brings
to hours made all
but ionic with
bright
electrics our
invisibly
parallel
filaments
of night
from anima (Nine Arches Press, 2013).
Order anima here and here.
Visit Mario’s website.
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