Mid-life, for poets Ð like anyone else Ð is a time of existential crisis. The deaths have started to pile up; the poet begins to rehearse his own. For some poets this means elegies and admonitions. But Corrado Paina writes directly to the dead, not about them: in his poems they share space with the living. And his response to his own mortality is not lectures but love poetry: to those same dead, who include friends and parents, and to his very much alive children and wife. And, as always, he writes letters to his city. An eloquent social critic and satirist, he has painted the city visceral red, orange, and purple. Now he adds green, the colour of tenderness. Corrado Paina’s poems are as passionate, funny, angry and bawdy as ever; middle age has hardly pacified him, instead he’s intensified his palette with a note of sweetness.Ó (Diana Fitzgerald Bryden)