Luiigi Marchini

The Anatomist Luiigi Marchini

The Anatomist is a profoundly moving collection of poems, destined to introduce a very fine poet to a wider readership in this, its third edition. Also included for the first time are two new works: The Blatant Exposure of Internal Organs and History Recalls How Cruel the Flood Can Be. These poems complement and expand on themes tackled in earlier editions. In turning his attention to social and bodily trauma, Luigi Marchini has sought and found beauty in those liminal spaces between skin and bone, the living and the dead, the man and the animal. Whether the subject is riding the wave of a biblical deluge, losing a new-born child or undergoing a medical scan, Marchini displays a sensitivity to colour, light and movement which provides both a balm and an imperative to stand witness. These poems are unflinching, sometimes forensic, but never cold. Simple poetic forms are applied with a rare skill, austere surfaces masking a lyrical richness. Everywhere, flesh is shown to be malleable, always dissolving and resolving around its wounds. The result is writing which jolts the reader with shimmering detail, as if we were passing an outspread palm over a nettle. In the Anatomist Luigi Marchini provides poems with an abundance of cultural allusions. For those who read with attention, there are references of William Carlos Williams's red wheelbarrow, the films of Ingmar Bergman and Walter Pater's musings on the Mona Lisa. However, he never lets these overwhelm or distract us from the core concern of the work, the question of what it is to be human.