Andrea Gibellini

Beacons for him in the Italian poetic landscape are Attilio Bertolucci (the epos of his family before and during the war in the mountainous countryside above Parma) and Vittorio Sereni (the stylisation in verse of industrial Milan), along with Leopardi (the doomed pastoral of the 19th century) and Montale (modern bourgeois life with a lyrical interpretation). He is also interested in such writers as T.S. Eliot, Wystan Hugh Auden and Seamus Heaney.

Gibellini has published in a number of important Italian and English periodicals. His poetry and essays on poetry have appeared in Nuovi Argomenti, Antologia Vieusseux and Oxford Poetry. He has published an essay on Auden in Ricercando Auden (Obliquo, 2003), and he edited a special poetry issue of review Panta (Bompiani, 1999). So far, two collections of his poetry have been published: Le ossa di Bering (The Bering Bones, 1993) and La felicità improvvisa (Sudden Happiness, 2001), for which he received the Premio Montale award. The poems presented here are intended for a new collection, Travel Instructions. [Andrea Gibellini took part in the Poetry International Festival Rotterdam 2008. This text was written on that occasion.]