"crib" by Mario Petrucci (Enitharmon, 2014)

Poems from Acumen, Antiphon, London Grip, etc. Parts were shortlisted in the Bridport. They're all for his son written before his son's first birthday. They're nearly all short-lined poems of couplets or triplets, often ending with an isolated line.

Here are 2 face-to-face poems. I've omitted the line- and stanza-breaks, and one instance of an extra space. The extra space is like a comma, I think, but the rest disrupt (more than assist) the parsing -

• i fish in dark with dark as spool & mark him sparely move as if i sought magnified on glass slide that form nekton slow-slewed on current i use him to snag but find me caught - nekton are "living organisms that are able to swim and move independently of currents". The words confuse me - I'd paraphrase them as "someone who's searching/fishing in the dark for something sees a baby barely moving, and gets caught himself".
• what pours from that so-fast treading there just under where rib might be - your one tight curd in muscle throwing throwing itself back & through & always back angry with life it fills with or empties hung in you as a red wasp in almost too small a web? - I can see a few images - a baby in sleep rapidly treading water; a baby arching his back, his anger like a wasp in a web fighting to escape. Is there a soft abdominal muscle?

I'm aware of some reasons why poets tells things slant - a distrust of language; a desire to make readers comprehend slowly; an attempt to overload the rational comprehension of imagery; etc. There are risks too however, and for me, the gamble pays off too seldom. The imagery is compacted at times beyond recognition without narrative to constrain connotations. I know that poetry (sometimes the best poetry) is hard to paraphrase but what about -

• night tentative bestrides you stripes you less tigercub than resistor - your quiet ohm almost tubular in gloom precision made precariously singular conducting headcot to basecot" - I know about the colour coding for resistors. But "quiet ohm"? Maybe a paraphrase is "near-night projects stripes on the sleeping babe from head to foot of the cot"?
• slugs diminish through light salt-porous as if waiting were due till one suck-sigh from waves north-keeping rheums the child-lucent span to temperate foam fizzes to deep water your fast-shrinking ice-aspirin of unsleep - this is close to word-salad, a call-my-bluff tease rather than a poem
• that when mortar fevers towards winter - sweats on the inside to shed summer down panes icily one stream at a time in downwardness disconcerted pooling on sills serum so far removed from veins it is lost to what is pure yet lacking specifics circulates much - I gradually lost my grip on this

Other reviews

• Aurora Woods (Crib is more accurately an exploration of the literary process itself. ... Whether the reader feels Crib rewards the close re-reading and still more re-reading required is a moot point, but for me, the whole experience was not quite enough.)