|
Click to order via Inpress: here
or via Nine Arches Press, or contact Mario at mmpetrucci@hotmail.com
Excerpt from book, on YouTube...
*
Click HERE for an audio excerpt: 'O anima' *
|
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.
These challengingly unorthodox poems are, in one sense, impromptu investigations into the anima-impetus within the male psyche; but they also immerse the reader in a primal love poetry that is sensuous yet vulnerable. 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.
“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.”
“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.”
“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.” anima was published in the late Spring of 2013 by Nine Arches Press.
or love
& skins
far within
once
under
hand
greenly
single
|
"Modernist marvels of love, clouds and nods to Neruda..." Poem Story Dream Reality
"There is simply nothing quite like anima around at the moment... The reader in effect is held continuously in a state of semantic and syntactic suspension, which is not resolved until the poem – often unwinding as a single, baroque sentence – is completed. In many ways these poems are perfectly tooled machines, in which form and content are inseparable. It is in their precision – their careful modulation of sensual and analytical detail, their tightrope walker’s approach to line and syntax – that their beauty resides... This remains ambitious and, it seems to me, important work. It is also an achievement, not the least of which is Petrucci’s serious and considered engagement with facets of the American modernist lyric tradition that are largely alien on this side of the pond... anima is a success, and not a qualified one either." [Dr Fulminare / Simon Turner]
“Thank goodness for Mario Petrucci... he is still waving the flag for modernism; still polishing words and scattering them like knives and bones, daring us to read the future.” "His poems... resemble the Cubists’ attempts to portray reality from multiple viewpoints... the modernist project, in the hands of a master like Petrucci, retains the power to shock, disturb – make it new.” [Ross Cogan, Orbis 166 (2013)]
"This is love poetry of a succinctly amorous kind." "Petrucci’s achievement… is to compress rich, deep and tender feelings into small spaces." [Acumen 78; Jan. 2014]
“It’s the internal echoes that bring me back to the page, the inner concord and cacophony.... arresting enough to pin me to the page for a good five minutes. Moments like this, once you’ve tuned into them, crop up all over. It is apt that Petrucci’s work has the attention of Birmingham’s modernist poet and jazz pianist Roy Fisher, because that same Black Mountain verve makes it to the page and it’s their anthropomorphic take on language, an independent fascination with words and – ultimately – a spiritual collaboration with them that anima does so well...” [Edward Ferrari, New Walk; Spring/Summer 2015]
FURTHER INFORMATION
& BOOKINGS
copyright mario petrucci 2001