[3][4][5] Petrucci has utilised poetry and film in a variety of educational, cultural and community settings so as to deepen public (and academic) engagement with human conflict, environmental issues and science, whilst also encouraging a more vital exploration of personal and historic memory.

His early output has been characterised as a shifting eclectic mix: this work was, by turns, spiritual/devotional, open-mic/humour/performance-oriented, politically-conscious/satirical, ecopoetic/scientific, site-specific, war-related and confessional (the latter often centred on relationships, childhood, or his Italian heritage and family); these plural concerns later condensed into extensive explorations of intensely felt love/loss and a more systematically neo-modernist drive (with eco-aware, metaphysical and 'concrete' leanings), punctuated by major public commissions and a growing engagement with watershed authors from other cultures and epochs.

[1][6] This intricate aesthetic journey culminated in the vast i tulips sequence, Petrucci's key avant-garde undertaking consisting of 1111 poems (with a 1111-line coda in 11 parts) described by the Poetry Book Society as an "ambitious landmark body of work”.

[19] Endorsed by Roy Fisher and Bill Berkson, the project combined rich imagery and intense musicality with a freshly-invented undulating form, proceeding through hundreds of variations, to generate "an energetic fusion of American and British modernism".

[22] Voiced by Juliet Stevenson, David Threlfall and Samuel West, these films have garnered awards such as the Cinequest, as well as screenings on mainstream television and at major cultural venues such as Tate Modern (in 2007).

[23] He later scripted the art film Amazonia, set in Peru, commissioned and showcased by the Natural History Museum, London to highlight the plight and global significance of rainforests.