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Herbert Lomas

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Review

Bosco, Mario Petrucci, Hearing Eye £5.95

“Bosco” is of course Italian for “woodland”, and Petrucci, a physicist and sociologist, has created a lamentation on our disappearing forests and an attack on the culture of waste. But it doesn’t read like propaganda, more like a love-affair with trees.

     ‘Entering the Forest’ reminds of Marvell’s ‘Garden’: “Then I fell./ A twisted blue and purple liana/ flailed me into a bouncing ball/ of mist…” Or the mystical feeling for the earth recalls the now almost-forgotten Richard Jefferies: Under an oak “Sap rises in the brain stem/ the bark of thought peels -/ and if I close my eyes/ breathe deep through nostrils/ I could be/ an ancient forest”. This erotic poetry of meditation - where, for instance, a woman, straddling a log, “falls on tumescent reds of flycap” - is written in sensuous language with a careful mixture of words, occasionally witty: I’m not sure a logwood should say “you have me stumped”.

     In bad moments the persona sees the earth becoming “a circus of tarmac”, “the moon a crescent of cement”. At other times he wonders what would become of him if he took all the earth in:

I would become an octopus
of sense - out of water, forced
to squirt around me an ink of fog.

Well, we’re losing the earth, but this is celebratory of it, not rubbing our noses in it, as some other poets are. The Sioux chief who foresaw the end of the Whites and the return of the prairies would like it.

 

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