Cardiff International Poetry Competition

Second Prize Winner - Mario Petrucci

Ecologist, PhD physicist and Royal Literary Fund Fellow Mario Petrucci is a multi-award-winning poet and residency frontiersman, the only poet to have been resident at the Imperial War Museum and with BBC Radio 3. Mario is four times winner of the London Writers competition, has won prizes in the National Poetry Competition, and is recipient of a PBS Recommendation, the Bridport Prize, an Arts Council England Writers' Award and a New London Writers Award. His Arvon-winning collection Heavy Water: a poem for Chernobyl (Enitharmon, 2004) was the basis of a celebrated film by Seventh Art Productions. The poem hornets is taken from Mario's vast Anglo-American modernist sequence, i tulips, from which his latest collection with Enitharmon (published 2010) takes its name. Aspiring to reach 1111 poems, “Petrucci’s tulips promise to grow into a truly ambitious landmark body of work” (Poetry Book Society Bulletin). For more information visit: www.mariopetrucci.com
Photo by Jemimah Kuhfeld.

 

hornets

humming
the far sides of paper
& plaster - their pent little

generator intensifying towards
noon energy condensed
in a flaw that

cyclic sun &
frost cleaved behind
cement & every dawn more

deranged as from that split
puncture each night
-heavy

bomb
momentarily
dropped before gaining

the heat-seeking line –
all through June
past July

my material
garden press-ganged
minutely to fortify a crew

multiplying towards winter –
one sloppy sailor glutted
on liquors asleep

on his rose
another aquiver in
an eye-socket of sparrow

as air's angry spores or obscenely
in view in pears or alone
on pine door or

post with those
tiny callipers curved
for conquest maw upon maw

until these men allotted white
with mortar & spray
seal them

in & leave
the day halved yet
suddenly healed except when

close : a knotted thrum stalling
the very spot I lay a
palm upon &

for a last hour
that might be my own
I see behind the wall that gross

grey cob hotting up unholy
oils - the striped
corn

popping