italy

poetteacherperformerscientistecologistwarpoet - home

italy

"Petrucci is of interest as one of the few contemporary poets exploring explicitly Italian themes and experiences
in the mainstream of British literature."
Il Punto 65

Mario has published numerous poems concerned with Italy's recent history, his childhood experiences of rural life in Lazio and Italian emigration following the IIWW. Anglo-Italian themes feature prominently in his award-winning collections Shrapnel and Sheets and Flowers of Sulphur. Securing a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, Shrapnel and Sheets was praised by the judge John Fuller for its "sensitive poems" about Italian family life.

His long sequence Contadine won the prestigious Sheffield Thursday Poetry Prize. Mario has also translated Catullus and Montale's famous Xenia sequences. He is currently working on a full-length collection entitled Monte Cassino.

Click here to read an interview with Mario in the Italian journal Il Punto

Click here for the Italian Wikipedia entry on Mario

"Already, this new century seems as deafened by ideological clamour as the last, plagued by residues of cultural and literary separatism sometimes bordering on a kind of 'aesthetic apartheid'. For nations increasingly brought face-to-face across cultural divides - chasms that are now as much internal as external - the need for conversation, on its many levels, has never been more essential. Poetry, with its potential for radical openness and self-revelation, is an ideal prompt and vehicle for that conversation. Many kinds of voice continue to lie dormant in the English-speaking world; but we have at least begun to witness, in more recent times, some breakings of silence."

Mario's views on cross-cultural discourse.

FURTHER INFORMATION
& BOOKINGS