Description
” Petrucci has the rare talent to be able to compose erotic poetry without any hint of prurience. ..These poems are essentially rhapsodic, uplifting.”
Acumen Sept 23
Inspired by Pablo Neruda and E. E. Cummings as much as by Rumi, Moonbird : love poems provides a courtship display of rare distinction, combining a compelling uniqueness of voice with insistent imagery and profound sonic beauty. These pieces strut regally before us in sensuous thrall to physical love; but they also soar with all the grace and composure of devotional literature, alert to each sacred updraught from the beloved. This is modern love poetry singing itself to strains of timelessness, its spirited flights of sensibility ever grounded in stillness. Admired for the vitality and innovation of his translations from classical and medieval love poetry (Catullus, Sappho, Hafez), Mario Petrucci here lights up language with the intensities of adoration across its many phases, from the pared crescents of near-wordlessness to consummation’s full-rounded soul-song.
About Mario Petrucci
Mario Petrucci is a metaphysical poet of international standing, an ecologist and PhD physicist. He is the only poet to have been resident at the Imperial War Museum and with BBC Radio 3, and has received major literary prizes across the board (National Poetry Competition (3rd); four times winner of the London Writers competition; Bridport Prize (winner); New London Writers Award). His book-length poem on Chernobyl, Heavy Water (Enitharmon 2004), captured the prestigious Arvon Prize for poetry and forms the backbone of a powerful new film (Seventh Art Productions). His other volumes include Flowers of Sulphur (2007), i tulips (2010) and the waltz in my blood (2011). Petrucci’s translations of Catullus, Sappho and Montale have won major recognition, including exposure in the national press, while his versions of the great mystic/love poet Hafez were published, by Bloodaxe, to wide acclaim. His remarkable poetry soundscape Tales from the Bridge was a centrepiece of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, and was shortlisted for the 2012 Ted Hughes Award for New Poetry. Mario lives in north London.
About Fair Acre Press
Fair Acre Press has published the highly regarded poets Selima Hill, Martin Figura and Fred D’Aguiar; the acclaimed NHS anthology These are the Hands; the prize-winning #MeToo anthology; the Ted Hughes Award for New Poetry-winning play by Kate O’Reilly; the first novel of polymath and nature writer Charles Foster; and other eclectic award-winning and 5 star reviewed books. Please click here for more information on other books published by Fair Acre Press.
You can watch a video Mario has kindly recorded, from the pamphlet, below
The first poem of the pamphlet:
Moonbird
From every compass-point of self: Beloved, I hear You.
Through momentary partings of cloud, I glimpse a blue
beyond distraction. You too are of heaven: we each bear
the goosebumps of angelic quills. Flight: our truest nation.
But love flies us further than morning, higher than angels:
when bodies, their seeded lands of dust, succumb to currents
of purity. We fell – but have a way up, each of us a wing
for the eagle that leads its camel, dumb yet noble with sand.
Your sea-scent reaches me on that breeze beyond breezes.
Dawn brings its once rent moon: separate halves rising, merging,
making whole. You are air sprung of water: so these hooves dare
to make Your cloud-shoal a home. Look closer: see our twin
pearls accrued from one oyster. Return us to union, for even
an ocean of weeping is pure. Sea thunders, heavy as ointment;
sky rolls its furrows – but there is light here, the sure light that
wakens. Is this at last our joint flight, our unsleeping tomorrow?
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