Mario Petrucci

Mario Petrucci (born 1958) is a British-Italian poet, literary translator, educator and broadcaster. He was born in Lambeth, London and trained as a physicist at Selwyn College in the University of Cambridge, later completing a PhD in vacuum crystal growth at University College London. He is also an ecologist, having a BA in Environmental Science from Middlesex University.^[1] Breaking with his early scientific career, Petrucci increasingly focussed on his literary projects, becoming the first poet to be resident at the Imperial War Museum^[2] and with BBC Radio 3.^[3][4][5]

Mario Petrucci
Born	Mario Petrucci Lambeth, London, UK
Occupation	Poet, physicist, ecologist
Nationality	British / Italian
Citizenship	United Kingdom
Alma mater	University of Cambridge, University College London, Middlesex University
Genre	Poetry, Science, Education
Website
mariopetrucci.com

Petrucci has utilised poetry and film in a variety of educational, cultural and community settings so as to deepen public (and academic) engagement with human conflict, environmental issues and science, whilst also encouraging a more vital exploration of personal and historic memory.^[6] He has actively used the media to disseminate his poetry, and his broadcasting experience includes BBC radio’s Kaleidoscope, London Nights, Sunday Feature, Night Waves, The Verb and the BBC World Service, as well as BBC TV.^[7]

Literary record

Petrucci's poetry debut, Shrapnel and Sheets (1996), won a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.^[8] Ensuing literary awards include the Irish Times Perpetual Trophy, the Daily Telegraph/ Arvon International Poetry Prize, the London Writers Competition (a record four wins), the Sheffield Thursday Prize (twice), the Bridport Poetry Prize, and the Silver Wyvern Award. Altogether, between 1991 and 2005, Petrucci won a total of 22 national and international open poetry competitions.^[6] Petrucci's poetry has also appeared in such outlets as The Spectator and The Independent,^[9] and has been noted in the Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian, with his diverse collections drawing inspiration situationally from key cultural sites, or exploring his core themes of love/loss, the tragedies of warfare, and science in the natural world.^[1]

2012 saw Petrucci shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award^[10][11] with a monumental poetry soundscape (among the largest ever created) entitled Tales from the Bridge.^{[12][13][14][15][16]} Commissioned by the Mayor of London, this installation spanned the Thames as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. Composed as a complex overlapping hybrid prose poem, and performed using subtle sonic textures with multiple interleaving voices, Tales from the Bridge was "assembled from literary forms such as short poems, atmospheric descriptions, local anecdotes, facts and figures".^[17] Collaborators for the project included Martyn Ware (The Human League) and Eric Whitacre, whose music was used. The soundscape played for two months along the entire length of the Millennium Bridge and was experienced by an estimated 4 million people.^[18]

Poetry, translation, film

A prolific poet, Petrucci's style and forms have constantly evolved. His early output has been characterised as a shifting eclectic mix: this work was, by turns, spiritual/devotional, open-mic/humour/performance-oriented, politically-conscious/satirical, ecopoetic/scientific, site-specific, war-related and confessional (the latter often centred on relationships, childhood, or his Italian heritage and family); these plural concerns later condensed into extensive explorations of intensely felt love/loss and a more systematically neo-modernist drive (with eco-aware, metaphysical and 'concrete' leanings), punctuated by major public commissions and a growing engagement with watershed authors from other cultures and epochs.^[1][6] 

This intricate aesthetic journey culminated in the vast i tulips sequence, Petrucci's key avant-garde undertaking consisting of 1111 poems (with a 1111-line coda in 11 parts) described by the Poetry Book Society as an "ambitious landmark body of work”.^[19] Endorsed by Roy Fisher and Bill Berkson, the project combined rich imagery and intense musicality with a freshly-invented undulating form, proceeding through hundreds of variations, to generate "an energetic fusion of American and British modernism".^[1]

Alongside this, Petrucci has been occupied with literary translation: 2018 brought his English versions of the Persian mystic poet Hafez via Bloodaxe Books, and in 2022 he was invited by the Society of Authors to judge the John Florio Prize for Italian translation.^[20] He has published versions of Catullus, Sappho, Rumi, Saadi and the Nobel-winning Eugenio Montale.

Petrucci's poetry has also been deployed in a number of films. Heavy Water: a film for Chernobyl and Half Life: a Journey to Chernobyl were two sibling features (by Seventh Art Productions)^[21] built around his award-winning poetry sequence on the Chernobyl disaster.^[22] Voiced by Juliet Stevenson, David Threlfall and Samuel West, these films have garnered awards such as the Cinequest, as well as screenings on mainstream television and at major cultural venues such as Tate Modern (in 2007).^[23] He later scripted the art film Amazonia, set in Peru, commissioned and showcased by the Natural History Museum, London to highlight the plight and global significance of rainforests.^[24]

Cultural, Educational, Cross-disciplinary (science-ecology-arts) work

Petrucci's poems, short stories, articles and essays often investigate cross-disciplinary concerns (creativity, politics, science, the environment),^[25] for instance the role of eco-art in dissolving society's resistance to pro-environmental change,^[26] or the cross-fertilisation of disciplines by applying 'Scientific Visualizations' as visual analogies to specific literary aspects of the humanities.^[27][28][29] He has also been much involved in the educational sector,^[30][31][32] in creative writing and literary mentoring, melding scientific and ecological awareness with creative writing praxis.^[33][34][35] He was instrumental in a number of London-based literary initiatives, including: the experimental collaborative 'co-vocal' poetry performance troupe ShadoWork; the Arts Council/ London Arts funded organisation writers inc. (which ran a variety of workshops and events); and the poetry magazine The Bound Spiral.^[6]

Petrucci has engaged with a wide range of cultural organisations, including the Royal Festival Hall, the Charles Dickens Museum, Southwell Workhouse, the Royal College of Surgeons of England, the European Space Agency, the London School of Economics, the Wellcome Foundation, and the Natural History Museum, London; he was also Royal Literary Fund Fellow on four occasions, at Oxford Brookes University, University of Westminster, Brunel University London, and the City and Guilds of London Art School.^[25]

Critical ideas

One of Petrucci's several critical-theoretical innovations in poetry is his nesting of concrete poetry within a larger concept he terms Spatial Form.^[a][36] This goes far beyond the overt spatial signals generated by a poem’s concrete shape or its chosen form and layout: Spatial Form incorporates all aspects of the poem's visual gestalt as physically manifested on the page, including such subtleties as typeface or the visual textures of repeated letters.^[37][38] Petrucci also coined the critical terms 'Poeclectics'^[39][40] and 'sonic stitching',^[41] and is first proponent of the new prose sub-genre 'Eco-sci-fi Flash Fiction'.^[26]

Books and pamphlets

• Shrapnel and Sheets (Headland, 1996) ISBN 0-903074-92-3 (Poetry Book Society Recommendation).
• Bosco (Hearing Eye: pamphlet 1999; book 2001) ISBN 1-870841-64-6 & ISBN 1-870841-77-8.
• Lepidoptera (Kite Modern Poetry Series, 88 & 96; 1999, 2001) ISBN 0-907759-47-5 & ISBN 0-907759-87-4.
• The Stamina of Sheep (the Havering Poems) (Havering London Borough Council / Bound Spiral Press, 2002) ISBN 0-9539939-1-4.
• The Havering Poetry Study Pack (Havering London Borough Council / Bound Spiral Press, 2002) ISBN 0-9539939-2-2.
• High Zest and the Doggerel March (Wilfred Owen – Genius or Sugar-stick?) (Bound Spiral Press, 2002) ISSN 0955-3819
• Heavy Water: a poem for Chernobyl (Enitharmon Press, 2004) ISBN 1-900564-34-3.
• Half Life (Poems for Chernobyl) (Heaventree Press, 2004) ISBN 0-9545317-3-6.
• Fearnought (Poems for Southwell Workhouse) (The National Trust, 2006) ISBN 1-84359-251-7 or ISBN 978-1-84359-251-8.
• Catullus (Perdika Press, 2006) ISBN 1-905649-00-2 (second re-print 2007, ISBN 978-1-905649-00-6).
• Flowers of Sulphur (Enitharmon Press, 2007) ISBN 978-1-904634-37-9.
• somewhere is january (Perdika Press, 2007) ISBN 978-1-905649-06-8.
• Sappho (Perdika Press, 2008) ISBN 978-1-905649-09-9.
• i tulips (Enitharmon Press, 2010) ISBN 978-1-904634-93-5.
• Nights * Sifnos * Hands (Flarestack Poets,^[42] 2010) ISBN 978-1-906480-24-0.
• the waltz in my blood (Waterloo Press,^[43] 2011) ISBN 978-190674240-9.
• the inward garden (St Edmund’s College, 2013) [limited edition] ISBN 978-0-9538316-9-2.
• anima (Nine Arches Press,^[44] 2013) ISBN 978-0-9573847-3-6.
• crib (Enitharmon Press, 2014) ISBN 978-1-907587-80-1.
• 1111 (Perdika Press, 2014) ISBN 978-1-905649-18-1.
• Xenia (Arc Publications, 2016) ISBN 978-1-910345-53-5 (Petrucci's translation of Xenia by Eugenio Montale).
• Beloved: 81 poems from Hafez (Bloodaxe Books, 2018) ISBN 978-1-780374-30-7 (Petrucci's translation of The Divan by Persian mystic poet Hafez).
• Isha Upanishad (Guillemot Press, 2019) (a modern English vers libre version of the ancient sacred Hindu text, the Isha Upanishad).
• afterlove (Cinnamon Press, 2020) ISBN 978-1-78864-095-4.
• Dawn Ravens (23 poems from Saadi and Rumi) (Lapwing Publications, 2022) ISBN 978-1-7397938-6-9.
• Moonbird : love poems (Fair Acre Press, 2023) ISBN 978-1-911048-74-9.

Films

• Heavy Water: a film for Chernobyl (with Phil Grabsky & David Bickerstaff) Seventh Art Productions, 2006.^[45][23]
• Half Life: a journey to Chernobyl (with Phil Grabsky & David Bickerstaff) Seventh Art Productions, 2006.^[21]
• Amazonia (with Lucy + Jorge Orta), commissioned by the Natural History Museum, 2010.^[24]

Awards

• 1993 Winner, London Writers Competition
• 1995 Edith Kitt Memorial Award
• 1996 Poetry Book Society Recommendation
• 1996 Edith Kitt Memorial Award
• 1997 Winner, Sheffield Thursday Prize
• 1997 Winner, inaugural Irish Times Perpetual Trophy
• 1998 New London Writers Award (London Arts)
• 1998 Winner, London Writers Competition
• 1998 Winner, Sheffield Thursday Prize
• 1999 Bridport Poetry Prize
• 2002 Daily Telegraph / Arvon International Poetry Prize
• 2002 Arts Council England Writers' Award
• 2003 Essex Book Awards Best Fiction Prize 2000–2002
• 2003 Silver Wyvern Award
• 2004 Winner, London Writers Competition
• 2004 National Poetry Competition: third prize cum laude
• 2005/2006 Arts Council England Grants for the Arts: Science in Poetry
• 2005 Winner, London Writers Competition
• 2007 Cinequest Film Festival Award, Best Short Documentary (Half Life: a Journey to Chernobyl)
• 2009/10 Arts Council England Grants for the Arts: i tulips
• 2012 Shortlisted for The Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry: Tales from the Bridge
• 2016 Winner, PEN Translates Award^[46]
• 2018 Shortlisted: John Florio Prize for Italian Translation (with Xenia by Eugenio Montale)^[47]

Notes

[a] - Petrucci's formulation of Spatial Form is not to be confused with Joseph Frank's unrelated 1945 term, dealing primarily with the abstract patterning of internal references and narratives implemented by an author across a work in order to create a unitary structure of meaning.^[48]