I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading Marco Fraticelli’s Night Coach (Guernica Editions, 1983) this week. The book was published in 1983, so I’m playing catch up (as I am with haiku publications in general) but after reading Drifting, I wanted to get to know Fraticelli’s work a bit more. And reading Drifting beforehand really enriched my reading experience of this collection. Night Coach contains some beautiful haiku. Many are love poems, some tender, some erotic, and the illustrations by Marlene L’Abbe are spare and powerful, perfectly complementing the text. For me, one of the best pairings of haiku and image is this one below:
There’s also a sense of loss countering this passionate affair, as in:
Funeral sermon
In my wedding suit …
Falling asleep
The irony of wearing the wedding suit to a sad occasion is heightened by ‘falling asleep’, an admission of fallibility that makes the situation both poignant and humorous. In fact, rereading the poem I start to create a backstory, asking myself why is he tired? Is it the relationship/ affair that is tiring him out or is it grief? Maybe it’s just boredom, in which case what was his relationship with the deceased? I like poems that open out in my mind and this, without being in any way ambiguous.
The inspiration for the later collection, Drifting, came from Fraticelli’s discovery of some letters in an abandoned house, and there’s a sense of walking through some of those empty rooms in one or two poems in Night Coach. For example:
A religious calendar
In the dead man’s room
And maps pinned to the walls
There’s just enough here to hint at a narrative, while leaving space for the reader to construct their own. A small number of the Night Coach poems do appear in Drifting, for example:
Moonlight on ice
The farmer carries heavy rocks
In his dreams
I’m tempted to say that the word ‘heavy’ might be superfluous here, but it does add emphasis – there’s a sense of burden, of exhaustion, of getting nowhere, and that cold ‘moonlight on ice’ lights up the scene, as though we’re watching the man’s struggle. Well, that’s how I see it anyway! I m glad I’m better acquainted with Fraticelli’s work now and I hope you feel the same.
And finally – I had a few problems uploading photos to the blog today – not the first time the ’tiled gallery’ function has got stuck. I found the old version so much easier to use!
Julie Mellor - poet 