A Corridor of Rain by Andrea Bianchi

A Corridor of Rain is the first full-length collection of poetry in English from significant Italian poet.

Forthcoming February 2011

Andrea Bianchi has said, ‘I dedicated twelve years to translating poets and prose writers and I learned to love their poems and short stories and novels. But poetry, for me, is always that powerful and mysterious voice of my childhood.’

Praise for A Corridor of Rain

Accuracy and precision are what we find in this book, close observations of the physical world and how it uplifts or tortures the spirit. It is as if Bianchi’s poems are telling us ‘here is something I have looked at or thought of a thousand times. But at last I have truly seen or understood it. At last.’

Thus this collection might be viewed as a series of epiphanies, or at least moments of illumination and comprehension (Oppen’s meaning?) in the most ordinary of circumstances or environments. At last the meaning intrudes. It insists. It will not be unmeant. And this meaning cannot be lost in the modern world’s atrocity of noise and dependence on unmeaning.

Bianchi has found the courage to mythologise his own experience. Thus he trusts his perceptions, fleeting or hard-won, and understands the inestimable value of their importance. He abjures ‘exaggeration’ and ‘inflation’ and frequently challenges us with a stark presentation of ‘facts’.

Robert Minhinnick

Andrea Bianchi was born in 1960 in Turin (Italy) where he still lives. He started writing poetry at the age of thirteen, though his creative bent can be traced back to his childhood when he used to invent stories for his friends. His first collection of poems, La stanza prosegue (Edizioni del Leone), was published in 1990, followed by Corvi spigoli neri (Edizioni del Leone) in 1996, …sospeso teso / filo di luci…(Mobydick) in 2002 and Abracacadarba (Mobydick) in 2008. An important Italian critic, Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti, defined Andrea Bianchi’s poetry as an ‘objective poetry of objects’ existing between ‘the ironic and the astonished with visionary and grotesque moments, and a basic tragedy’. In February 2011 his first collection of poems in English, A Corridor of Rain, translated by Silvana Siviero with a Foreword by Robert Minhinnick, will be published by Cinnamon Press.

He is working on a novel in English, two chapters of which appear in the third and fifth issues of Blue Tattoo, a short story magazine. Since 1997 Andrea Bianchi and Silvana Siviero, his Welsh-born wife, have worked as translators. Their series, Parole dal Galles / Geiriau o Gymru (Mobydick), created and directed by them, and supported by Wales Literature
Exchange, promotes the literatures of Wales. It is unique in Italy and a flagship project for other European countries. They are the founding editors of a unique series of poetry in UK, Minorities Not Minority: English Window on Italian
Cultures, forthcoming from Cinnamon Press. Italian authors who do not speak/write/dream only in Italian but in regional
languages such as Sardinian, Friulian etc, reach the world in English thanks to collaboration between Andrea Bianchi, Silvana Siviero and experts from these cultures.

They also organise events and festivals, supported by Mobydick publisher, Biblioteche Civiche Torinesi, Circolo dei Lettori di Torino, Associazione Italo- Britannica in Bologna, British Council in Milan, the Academi, Istitut Ladin – Furlan “P.C. Placerean” in Udine, the Città di Sassari, the Association ‘Amistade’ from Olbia, Biblioteca ‘Satta’ in Nuoro, the universities of Bologna, Forlì, Sassari, Torino, Glamorgan, to promote the books translated. Special emphasis is placed on performance.