"afterlove" by Mario Petrucci (Cinnamon Press, 2020)

The first piece I liked was "storm", which (minus line-breaks) ends - "from blue-black tops a glow in us that shifts from over shoulders to make you crane & arch your spine shuddered supple along its length & split from mine as a lash tossed out & up just before its downward snap until our breath in great fat drops slaps into our sunlit dust your slow slow oh"

Here are 2 starts that don't appeal to me -

• an interior the size of a cantaloupe you grow on mother-sap (p.28)
• you dark-eyed god god-eyed whose eyes brim dark you look & suck then suck & look (p.30)

and here's one that does

• because of You our sky is Ocean in suspense (p.38)

Here are extracts that don't appeal to me -

• before brain could wink I turned to face you saw that look of your own making hung there in darkness eyes unblinking burnt black with love ... now in dimmest light your eyes unopened here beside me with another's love aglow in your face (p.49)
• a kiss unearthed dreadless from our subsoiled bed presented as if its one coin undated were all that remained of your great abandoned civilisation (p.55)
• Our eyes scan the question but don't quite rhyme. (p.57)

Other reviews

Liam Nolan (Divided into four sections, there is a loose narrative that can be glimpsed throughout. From the intensity of a relationship, portrayed mostly in bed (carnal in parts, but there is also the sensuality of sleep and simply being near another) through to familial love, and on to the ‘afterlove’ of the title: that point at which love collapses, is broken, but its aftermath still surrounds.)

"i tulips" by Mario Petrucci (Enitharmon, 2010)

Maybe the "i" in the title is Italian for "the". The poems are from London Magazine, Magma, Oxford Poetry, Stand, etc. I think they were written quickly, the poems in this book selected from over a thousand.

Short lines (less than 5cm) and 3-lined stanzas predominate (p.83 uniquely has zigzag triplets). Sometimes there's extra space between the words (sometimes where a full stop would normally be). I usually have trouble with such pieces. Here are the book's start - "That tulip set by the window in its vase of dusk is like a flame. You cannot help but say — no. Because a tulip caught in that glass is a flame — and once you have said it how to return to bloomed stem or soft spike of anther where now is fire? ". I can make sense of this, but it's wordy. The book version compounds the clutter by adding white space - this extract is spread over 20 or so lines.

"starlings so" is conceptually more compact. It's about an apple tree suddenly filled with starlings, their "half-flight contrast to static rounds of flesh". The narrator decides that s/he'll "not let starlings eat but burst blackchaff at my bullet-clap knowing they think my hands a thing of dread a thing apart & gone in a swarm i am left a tree cored of starlings & cannot be sure i was not of them". That final quote (which I mostly like) spans 13 lines - more than 4 stanzas. "apart" is actually "a" and "part", separated by a stanza break - a useful double meaning (I've used it myself) but if the cost is that lots of other (to my mind gratuitous) line/stanza breaks need to be added, I don't think it's cost-effective.

Other poems also exploit word-breaking opportunities - e.g.

charcoaled bones fis sured & more dee- ply dark than sp- ace on x-ray as order -lies watch my blu- shes rise (p.99)

I'm not against such devices. Here's the start of something I wrote in 1999

Wipe the mist away to find the mirror, ex/citing land, the wake a/Sterne reminder that nothing's new to the sure readers, never flagging in their resolution, in/de-forming the silenced cannon, syntax ran/sacked, holed where elements end and arrangement beg[in]s

It has puns (mist, sure, flagging, cannon, holed) and word-breaks but few line-breaks - when in doubt I left them out.

I struggle with many phrases in the poems. Sometimes there's a lucid image trying to get out - he's committed to telling it slant. Sometimes I'm lost. Here are some examples -

• a twosome creature all but one yet s-/hunted through in/-cremental selves by diet of said-&-done (p.26)
• cicadas revving up for sun let slip an extra watt : how one begets that cheesegrater or/-chestra shifting in the ear as sand through gears of current (p.46). This begins well, but (not for the first time) tries too hard at the end.
• friend take me on - not as volumes whose spines flex with con/fusion or half-erected schools of confession raised arcadian around my cloisters to fix half-minded thought whose luke-warm dinners & fast propel this small engine through biography two-thirds lived in (p.49)
• i have a bay in me whose walls gaze out fresh as milk to draw a tongue of ocean lapping - where eye levels horizon to raise the bowed & one spireless geometry ushers this body to its cooler shadow where dusk touches my dusk (p.52). I like the idea of an internal bay. At the mention of walls I wonder whether I should hold in mind "bay window" as well as a cliff-flanked seaside bay. But why bring freshness into it? Why milk? A tongue laps at milk. The images don't constructively cohere, nor do they interestingly oppose.
• as if death might come to me fully lit or drowse if i could stay with it all that bitter way to cud some dawn steeped in juice or slumber whose point of breaking is almost that stunned return to yesterday (p.83). I like the "cud some dawn" idea.
• though there never was time i ventured by night any s-/pit of sand & if dreams of others send us to sleep might sea be something near conscious vastly & sleeping that in its slumber dreams me? (p.85)
• is it that loss before the loss - glimpsed in eye-glow of either while still pressed together - or as air-hand grasp for child lost to crowd while child still trots beside you in blood red duffel (p.87) - I'm unsure what this all means. The words distract. Maybe instead "a hint of loss to come - in a hugged lover's glowing eye, or a hand reaching for a toddler thought lost in a crowd but there beside you in blood red duffel"
• through all this lull of green the hospital behind me s/parse in its re/petition of extinguishers (p.93). I like this as it is.
• to sway me full into what s/wells within till b/lack has clasped each oilslick lung (p.99)

He writes -

• "I'm seeking a species of language that can enlist and enact feeling and thought, rather than merely express emotion and think out loud... instead of talking about thoughts and feelings, I want poems that themselves think and feel."
• "There's something almost quantum mechanical about many of the poems in the i tulips project, where syntax is made to hang - not least across line-breaks - so as to offer (though without becoming, one hopes, merely chaotic) a simultaneity of various possibilities for meaning. In a sense, there are different 'states' for the poem that co-exist as probabilities before a particular (perhaps more singular) reading of the text enacts certain decisions/interpretations within the listener's/reader's ear, decisions that 'collapse' the poem, as it proceeds, into a given observed state. Of course, conventional poems too may carry a plural quality; but in i tulips the occurrence is heightened and deepened"

which is all fair enough. When I was younger I think I was more sympathetic to these views. Since then I think I've veered towards surface clarity, hoping that readers can see through to the mysteries - Magritte and Escher.

My favourite is "we have to talk you &". It's longer than the other poems, which makes me more forgiving of the parts I don't understand.

Other reviews

• David Pollard ([i t 61] is an extremely subtle and, I think, great poem. There are many like it in i tulips ... Examples include 'what stirs this is-' [i t 48] and 'i have heard in' [i t 95])

"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.)

"Flowers of Sulphur" by Mario Petrucci (Enitharmon, 2007)

Poems from Acumen, Ambit, Orbis, Stand, The Spectator, etc. "Negatives" won the Bridport in 1999.

"Amaretti" mentions "Toadstool tops" and setting wrappers alight - allusions familiar to me, but more baffling to others. Fortunately there are YouTube videos about "setting fire to amaretti wrappers". "Orders of magnitude", "Request" and "Airfix" is a little sequence that would puzzle no one, but soon after that there's "footage" which is way beyond me.

Here's some imagery that caught my eye -

• he simply walked quarter speed behind a nebulous hearse of thought (p.28)
• our classroom became a space lightened as if by a wind-felled tree (p.28)
• one by one, those twinned red eyes of braking blinked shut (p.71)

"Fearnought" by Mario Petrucci

A National Trust publication, with photos, about the Southwell Workhouse, a mostly empty building. The "Food and Prayer" section begins with "Even this Earth must yield a little at every step we take. Can't you feel? - or hear our dead: their tiny time-shrunk moans filtering up through clay, loam made dense with flesh and bone - just to support us?" which is accessible enough, though in the book it's 3 stanzas and 12 lines. Later, "Plan" uses line-breaks to break words, making new words - e.g. "as I/ lift into that dark or/biting earth". I think "Daguerreotype" has the best chance of working outside of this book.

Several of the poems have useful (usually historical) footnotes.

Other reviews

• David Pollard (Fearnought is vivid and empathetic. It is clear that the poet was strongly affected by the echoes that struck his inner ear in the spaces and emptiness of the workhouse. However, it still seems (to me at least) like an almost impossible task well performed. The problem is that it was a task)