“Mysticism is the unknown – and everyday life is full of that.”

In his latest poetry collection, Cardiff poet Robeto Pastore rails against the sense that we are ‘being told the thing that is there isn’t there, the thing that’s happening isn’t happening. He told Jenny White how he uses poetry to navigate this disorienting landscape

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USING wonder and brokenness, fear and heroism, Roberto Pastore’s second poetry collection, Graveyards on Other Planets, highlights the mystery in the mundane.

“Mysticism is really just the unknown, and I think everyday life is full of that,” he says. “I don’t think we need to necessarily search it out - I find it happening daily.”

In a world that seems shattered, this milestone book shines with a hope that is not as fragile as it looks. It is a collection of poems written from the edge of the world: “vultures circle/blood scents the air/regardless I walk my beating heart to the arena,” read the opening lines.

There is a sense of imminent doom and ferocious hope, resplendent even in despair. His use of language is beautiful, elegiac, yet never overwrought; it carries the genius of perfectly placed, perfectly timed words that hit both the gut and the heart, shining as if passing along shards of selenite dug into the earth.

“I love writing a line that really feels like magic,” he says. “If you can write a line that seems to unlock something you couldn’t otherwise have got to, it's like a little door into a part of your own brain or into the world. After a while, it becomes a bit of an obsession, just trying to write that perfect line that will unlock something.”

As the title suggests, some of these poems look into space. With this comes the fear of falling upwards, outwards, into oblivion; the dreaded feeling that, as Yeats put it, “things fall apart/the centre cannot hold”.

Personal risk and dismemberment are mirrored by a planet plundered to a precarious brink.