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In
the introduction to his earlier set of poems Fearnought, the product of a
residency in Southwell Workhouse during 2004-5, Mario Petrucci writes: 'We
all know the best listeners make us talk. In fact, the structure [of the
building] was (for me) such an ardent listener I had to maintain a careful
distance'. This, he explains, was partly because of the curatorial decision
to leave the place largely empty. 'It is audacious - almost outrageous - to
present the visitor... with so very little.' Later he adds: 'Moving on to
other species of absence, there is certainly an odd richness behind the
spareness you encounter at Southwell Workhouse'. Here is an interesting
series of observations about creativity; that emptiness, a space that needs
filling, elicits it, and, if I can pre-empt myself, that the holiness of
silence and a distance that can never be really covered hovers around poetic
language allowing it to be what it is.
I feel that this becomes a central feature of Petrucci's work even if, in Fearnought, the notion is taken
little further and we have to await his later work for this insight to take a
more powerful form. There is certainly a strong sense of the horrors of such
places, and the sense of lack in its many guises, that is underlined by the
photos, in Fearnought,
of
stark rooms and blank walls. 'Gruel Cauldron' hints at the void:
They have
forged
a bottomless mouth.
The
deepest well of nill. [F23]
'Shanty' is a vivid plea to structure a boat out of the bits and pieces of
the workhouse experience. It
ends:
... - just break
that window
Give me
a breeze
[F 24]
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 and, as Keats well knew, poetry as task or 'spur', as 'a
trial of (the) imagination' does strange things to a poet's creativity. This
is also perhaps true of Heavy Water: a poem for Chernobyl (2004) based on
eyewitness accounts of the disaster.
The very strength of the external impetus - and there could hardly be
a more moving one - imposes itself on the verse; emphasises a distance to be
covered. Here, the poet is aiming towards the object of his writing; to
sympathise with it. Empathy here speaks the object, not the distance; and the
greatest poetry swells in the distancing (or the awareness in the poet of the
impossibility of overcoming that distance) rather than in the object. This is
clear from the many pieces in Heavy Water that are in the voices of
others, which is a distancing of a different kind. 'Two Neighbours' speak in
the following terms:
... You play music.
The whole
world
rattles
and you play
music?
So we will
die
dancing.
Or:
I dreamed I was
dead - but
mama was
crying in the dream.
She cried so
loud it woke me up.
She woke me
up so I wouldn't die.
[HW 40]
Again:
'At last
I look
through. Remember
I have a
daughter.'
[HW 55]
These are unquestionably powerful images, powerfully expressed. It is in the
effort intrinsic to that power, devolved into a kind of theatricality, and in
the sense of the dramatic, that the success of these pieces lies. Later, Petrucci does better by
failing. For, at the heart of his best work - in Flowers of Sulphur (2007), i tulips (2010) and even the
much earlier Shrapnel and Sheets (1996) - there is distancing
and the strangeness that distancing enhances. After all, the enhancing of
distance is at the core of the humanist - i.e. the non-religious or modernist
- poetic life. There is an attempt (and the strain of it wrings its way out
of the sounds made here) to make sense of what has been lost, of what must be
lost; in a word, perhaps, mortality. To quote: this is a poetry of 'parabolas
// where nothing must collide' [FS 16]. The tangent that just misses is a
constant refrain here: 'the closeness of lines / That never quite touch /
That spells disaster' [SS 29].
It is precisely this circumspection which is crucial to poetry.
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'Bunshop',
the title poem of Flowers of Sulphur - another wonderful evocation of
childhood - is again about how hope can be lost after all the sensual touches
of attraction:
Her hand in my pocket
my Žclair in
the other. I blew it.'
(Note the double meanings.) But then we have: 'Three stupid words. I'm a Catholic.' [FS 18]. 'Elisabetta' [FS 20] tells
the same story, while in i tulips we have this reference to love:
'half a ear & It // shifts : as any body / must - its lust a / touch
looser at // the jowl...' [i t 26]
Again: '... as though / your resting had keys to // every chamber whose /
open doors i // cannot step / through...' [i t 29]
And again: 'between as //
each lot of / room is / breathed now // between us...' [i t 30]
Almost every poem here possesses this fascination with yearning and with the
relinquishing of yearning, with the fading of things. There's an almost painful sense of
the loss of presence, the very language trying to reconvene what has gone
before: 'a half hour after // you leave' [i t 39]. So many pieces in these
volumes could be taken to illustrate this aspect of Petrucci's work. In 'Meat Inspector', the description
of the carcasses is vivid: 'Tight buds of heart; / Lobes and cusps of liver';
meanwhile, the poet thinks:
... how far removed
From the boy
and his snare
The wooded
glen, the glimpse
Of long ears
in grass...
and then:
You catch my
eye... but look awayÉ
I
follow your gaze.'
[SS 31]
Loss among the carcasses - of life, of youth, of expectations. The poet knows
it, of course, but also knows that the inspector knows it. Losses and distances. In 'Bridges' [SS 28] a memory of
early love ends:
the strand of
hair stuck to your cheek
that said it
all, which now I ease aside
across these
distances?
while i tulips carries
a refrain of letter and post, as if awaiting delivery (of child, of
expectations?) and attempting to address (which is also, of course, a
question of language):
love sends
itself flowers
and mails its
single-stemmed
blood down
the spinal telegraph all
petal and
thorn and never signs the card...
[i t
41]
There are things left in the air after departure: 'a half hour after // you
leave some al- / most thing starts...' [i t 39]. Here, Petrucci quotes
Frank O'Hara: 'the only way not to leave is to go' [i t 44]. Inevitably, we
hear the loss that runs through generations: mothers, fathers, grandfathers;
that attempt to catch again the tremor of the past. In 'Light Stitching' [FS
52], for example, we see this in repeated images. Here are the first two:
Or you,
father, pointing down to a Sicilian harbour -
its dark pincers
compressing an eye-glass
of water
Or my skin,
watered down by a lifetime out of your sun
yet thick and
dark through our blood's long curing
in white
light...
In the first stanza the eye-glass changes the optics of the image, perhaps
seen through some telescope placed to the eye the wrong way round. In the second, the attempt to catch
the original dark Italian blood has been distanced by 'long curing / in white
light'. 'Last Words' [FS 56]
plays the same game ('What did he say / exactly? // Truth is, I
couldn't hear') but settles for an earlier memory which is clearer and less
painful ('Good boy
/ he told me') - though how well is it remembered?
All dead now, supposedly, those former generations speak in both their
positive, life-affirming voices and with negative tones of deprivation. Here we find images of funerals with
their inevitable sense of loss, of distancing (lip, brink, portal), and, at
his father's death-bed, a tectonic shifting between extremes:
and me
breathless,
arriving at the bed
too late
last-born
son myself
three weeks
early.
[SS 47]
Again: 'where / vintage and vinegar have each their place' [SS 50]; 'the white and black of your
days' [SS 52].
There is a kind of burden (in both the sense of a weight and the old sense of
chorus; something recurrent as well as heavy) implicit in the mood of these
pieces. This burden reifies the poems by its sharpness and the clarity of its
sensuality. Concretion, avidity, are signs of the poetic master but also of
the scientist that Petrucci is; there is a seeking after the proof that the
modern scientist knows is ever on the verge and yet must remain just out of
view. The unknown out there is always so much more than the known, yet rests
on it with the weight of its secretive gravity. The effort to name, the specificity of the perceived, is
the only thing that keeps the unknown (or seems to keep the unknown)
at bay. These crucial touches of the concrete are what Petrucci is so good
at. There are simply too many instances to quote, as it is this quality that
makes up the very language of his work; but to give a notion of what I mean:
the glass
you left
behind -
scallop-edged
with
lip-prints
i could see
the cypress
through
that glass -
no less
distorted
&
your mouth
proscenium arch
with
darkening
stick of
light...
[i
t
56]
or:
... the squat
turret of a paraffin burner.
Utter black
of carbon, bright flowers
of
sulphur. Red lead.
[SS 23]
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These
concretions live (have their Being) precisely where they press up against the
unknown, the Holy. The more accurate and well placed, the more the other
(absolutely Other) veils itself and holds itself apart. Just where the
tangent should touch, it passes close enough to leave a trace which the
reader is aware of losing in the very process of reading. Petrucci holds, in
part at least, that precision of the failure of all the greatest poetry.
Here's one example (out of many) from Flowers of Sulphur [FS 39], a poem
quoted in full:
NAPE
I am a suggestion
between workings of brain,
the solid ridge
of spine - a
curvature
kin to breasts, hip,
loins.
Almost touchable,
I tender flesh, still, in old
acquaintances
who might
have been
something
more.
To a subtle fingertip
my nap is
velvet - in some strangers
I am a lily's
stem
geisha-cool.
I glow under moons
beneath the
wedge-dark, am back door to eyes -
those hogs of
the bone-glint,
of the
brink of sharing.
Eased aside,
locks
reveal me:
curtain raised on my milky
opening night
- or slightly bowed,
offered to
the axe.
I choose this partly because of the insignificance of its subject, because it
treats of what Blake calls 'minute particulars' ('to Particularise is the
Alone Distinction of Merit') rather than something big and startling. But
even here Petrucci manages (this must be intentional) to hold back. The very
specificity is tangential. The italics are mine, to show how the language
avoids exact contact. The last stanza, I feel, being the most surprising, is
a falling away of this retreat from the Holy.
It is a question of the impossibility of finding the mot juste, which always remains
just out of reach (the mot juste is the expression of this
distance); it is a question, above all, of the exactitude of the tangential,
of the precise way that the tangent misses the circle; it is about the way in
which words that mean something other (as words must) will come together and
lie beside each other ('lie' in both senses) in such a manner as to show us
that sense is always lost - or rather, that things make sense only insofar as
that loss can be put into language.
Words must fail, yet nonetheless they sing together in a certain way, at
least for the moment (or more than the moment, for the poem remains). Words
locked thus, together, always remain also apart, tangential - just as a
vessel must tack towards its target at an angle. The very matter of
Petrucci's poetry marks its failure to state. Words do what perceptions do:
miss their targets; cannot mean the same to writer and reader, speaker and
listener. The poet's world is at the same time both my world and,
intriguingly, not my world - and yet, poetry stakes its reputation on the
possibility that the two are not blind to each other.
This is of course a Heideggerian notion: the poem as that which disrupts or
dislocates in its articulations.
The poet lives within the silence between word and word; the chasm,
the distance. This is what
Heidegger calls, following Holderlin, the Holy - it is the tangent missing
its circle again.
One form of this is metaphor, a carrying over of one thing into another and
vice versa, and stronger than a simile's 'like' because it pretends with its
'is' identity. The very fact
that one thing passes over into another denies this, keeps separate:
each tree is
a sound
soft-spoke
to unwheeled
sky
perhaps
or passing
cloud...
[i t 61]
Note the strong 'is' at the breathing point at the end of the line, and the
'perhaps': words that play against each other. The 'unwheeled' also denies
itself later in the piece as being 'once hubbed / & radial', though this
refers to another metaphor, not tree to sky but tree to mind: 'i would set //
mind as / these trees...' (with 'as' making this a simile, rather), where
'set' is understood as something that cannot be seen, itself momentary. The
metaphor is, in fact, with the body - tree to body:
... taken root & grown past
its paring
having
absorbed what heat
comes in to
build a year-by-
year body...
Now we begin to be aware of the multiplied distancing that is going on here.
The tree is the body, the year-by-year body, the rings of the tree unlike the
unwheeled sky or, indeed, the mind. Yet how the mind here transmogrified
itself into the body is not clear, is kept apart by the critical colon
carefully placed with a space to either side. Here is the whole section:
... i
would set
mind as
these trees:
closeset &
filigree
like
something once hubbed
& radial
staked
out : taken
root & grown past
its paring
having
absorbed what heat
comes in to
build a year-by-
year body...
Until the final reprise, this is the tangent of death passing the circle of
life; the circles of the mind, the circles in the tree trunk, the 'unwheeled
sky'. The poem closes with:
...
mind so
still in its
s-
hell as to
be
detectable
barely
till my
tomb stone
deep in
upward shadow
leaps upon
me like a
child around my neck
Notice the (at least) double call of 'still' and the singing of 'still in...
hell', in its shell. Mortality cries out for metaphor, since it cannot be
known - at least on the humanist agenda - in any other guise. And here,
Petrucci does something wonderful by linking it with birth; that is, by calling
on the double meanings of generation (the shell, if you please, containing
hell within it - after death, or promised by life?). The shadow is 'upward' yet deep; it
'leaps upon / me like a child around my neck' - a child as a stone, a weight
(of mortality again?). To 'be // detectable / barely' hints again at the veil
covering the unknowable - need I say more?
This is an extremely subtle and, I think, great poem. There are many like it
in i tulips and (if to a
slightly lesser degree) in Flowers of Sulphur. Examples include 'what stirs this is-' [i t 48] and 'i have heard in' [i t 95] with its
wonderful final flourish of separation:
... go
on waving
your
stick & i
shall shake
mine
or 'Late September, 2001':
How a twist
of cells can work such wonder
where a
poet's words don't reach.
[FS 81]
with its threat of 'freak / impending thunder' and a spider 'hung in her
patch of unsafe sky'. There are so many multiple inferences in these cited
pieces, and in many more.
Petrucci's most recent collection, i tulips, is evidently a small selection
from a much longer series. This volume is the first of a planned trilogy with
Enitharmon (the next volume entitled crib). There is also a Perdika
pamphlet which I have not yet seen ('somewhere is january') and further
extracts planned with Flarestack (Nights * Sifnos * Hands) and Waterloo Press
(the waltz in my blood). I look forward to seeing these. Certainly, with the i tulips project, Petrucci has
arrived at a very high (or perhaps profound?) voice. These poems ring in the
mind long after reading
© David
Pollard 2010
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