Crib

crib draws on the 111 poems Mario Petrucci composed for his newborn son, a series completed on his first birthday. Tender though never sentimental, inventive yet anchored in physical and psycho- logical reality, this many-sided poetry records a father's profound attentiveness to his boy, refracted through the poet's radical devotion to language. In its fascination with infant consciousness, crib adds a distinctive strand to Petrucci's immense i tulips sequence. Bringing wakefulness and sleep to archetypal pitch, these lines extend paternity into fresh dimensions that encompass ecology, geology and cosmology until, with Walt Whitman, we witness how 'the grass is itself a child'.