iSOLATION by Tom Petsinis

 

Tom Petsinis’s pandemic era collection iSOLATION unfolds like a vast illuminated diary of rupture and revelation, a poetic ledger chronicling how a world in crisis rearranges the light, the breath, the rituals, and the mathematics of being human. In these poems, the ordinary becomes uncanny, the mundane turns mythic; the virus is both shadow and mirror, exposing the fragile architectures on which we rest our lives. The poet does not simply document lockdown, he transforms it into a metaphysical landscape where statistics, nature, ancestry, and mortality collide in shimmering clarity.

From the opening poem Three Clouds, where a driver on an errand is halted by clouds resembling a surgical mask, a toilet roll, and Mozart’s wig, the collection declares its sensibility: the pandemic’s surreal overlay on daily life, the way symbolism intrudes uninvited, reminding us that the world is no longer neutral.

I’m driving to buy a masonry bit,

To drill and brace with steel rods

Exposed footings rigid with past

Tom excels at reanimating the natural world, giving agency to birds, trees, and winds—creatures suddenly reclaiming the stage vacated by human haste. In Birds, planes are grounded, and “birds reclaim the skies,” their voices sharpening the stillness into something orchestral and alive. In Kangaroo, the creatures stand “muscles like a trap,” half myth, half mirror for our own alertness and fear. Nature here is no mere backdrop; it is witness, commentary, and collaborator.

Some of the collection’s most powerful poems are its elegies—Greek Funeral, Online Funeral, My Father’s X Rays each capturing how grief mutates under restriction, how mourning stripped of touch and proximity becomes even more piercing. The image of a coffin lowered into a rain flooded grave, with mourners “wiping on grass soles thick with mud,” devastates through its restraint. In My Father’s X Rays, the speaker holds translucent film up to sunlight, searching its shadows for the father he lost: ribs that once held hope, a heart reduced to shade, the “nothing from which I was conceived.”

Petsinis’s language throughout is meticulously calibrated, clear yet elevated, domestic yet prophetic. His imagery is grounded in suburban Australia. In the end, the book feels like a time capsule of consciousness itself, our collective ache, our recalibrated senses, our rediscovered awe. Tom has captured not just what happened, but how it felt to live under a thinning sky, listening for the world to breathe again.

A collection radiant with observation, sharpened by solitude, and anchored in the tender mathematics of hope.

 Rochak Agarwal