Mario's biography is complex, to say the least.  Originally a Natural Sciences graduate, he moved into freelance writing after a stint in science teaching, a PhD in optoelectronics at UCL, organic farming/goat-herding in Ireland, and a further BA in Environmental Studies at Middlesex University.  He was inaugural Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Oxford Brookes University, (later) the Fellow at Westminster and Brunel Universities, then most recently at the City and Guilds of London Art School. 

Often sumptuous and lyrically contemplative, Mario’s early poems could be described as a shifting eclectic mix of the confessional and the metaphysical.  He dwelt on romantic involvements, on his family/childhood memories of London and Italy, particularly war-related anecdotes or the subtle incongruences of Italian heritage playing out in an Anglophone education; but his juvenile creativity was equally stoked by an unshakeable sense of the spiritual nature of materiality and an innate devotion to the life force.  That said, he delighted too, in paradoxical fashion, in performance-driven slapstick writing and humour, in joyous vulgarities and political satire.  Enduring concerns in his oeuvre that hark back to his earliest output include: his immigrant family, with its psychological and actual bereavements; the realities of warfare; romantic intensity, love/unlove; science, medical procedures, and the insights of quantum physics; ecology, Ecopoetry, the natural world under impossible strain; consciousness, mindfulness, the mysterious imperatives of Being. Although this plural alertness persisted, it did later noticeably crystallise into impassioned explorations of love-loss and a more systematic neo-Modernist impetus that found ways to fully incorporate his ecological, metaphysical and concrete/spatial awarenesses.  This developmental trajectory was itself punctuated by major public commissions that led to in-depth literary interactions with key cultural organisations, as well as a growing engagement with the translation of watershed poets from diverse cultures and literary eras. 

Clearly, then, Mario is no writer of singular or habitual voice, but immerses himself in what he has termed ‘Poeclectics’. The Warwick Review notes “the extraordinary variety of this poet: his scientific and political commitments, his sharply physical response to the world of the senses, his unsentimental embrace of facts of life and behaviour”.  Prolific by any standard, his style and forms have been driven by his evolutionary modernist instincts.  Mario's intricate aesthetic landscape certainly resolves into at least one zenith (after mid-2005) in the form of the vast i tulips project, an immense experimental undertaking of 1111 poems, terminating in a 1111-line coda in 11 sections.  Endorsed by doyens Roy Fisher and Bill Berkson, i tulips not only lays claim to being one of the longest sequences ever composed, but also stimulates prosody with a plural, sonically-charged source of rich imagery moulded into strikingly visual, undulating forms (chiefly what the author calls 'bevelled tercets').  This irresistible dynamic culminates Mario's life-long endeavour: to challenge English-speaking poetics to embrace his profoundly human, “energetic fusion of American and British modernism” (Poetry International). 

Photography credit: Graham High.