Archive for June, 2005
The poetic absurdism of Catharina Gripenberg
30 June 2005 | Authors, Reviews
Photo: Linda Stråka
The wind blows a great deal in Catharina Gripenberg’s second collection of poems, Ödemjuka belles lettres från en till en (‘Humble belles lettres from one to one’, Schildts, 2002). In the first poem we meet three siblings who, on their way across a bridge, are scattered and thrown about by the wind. In another poem a house blows away as a family sit around the dinner table – an event that does not, however, give rise to feelings of vulnerability, but becomes an opening to the world instead.
Perhaps the wind can be seen as an image of Gripenberg’s poetic strategy, a poetry in which nothing is really held in place and where anything may happen. Behind this strategy one senses a resistance to rigidity and outward fixation and a defence of the power of the imagination and of poetry’s ability to create freedom. More…
Travelling alone
30 June 2005 | Fiction, poetry
Poems from Ödemjuka belles lettres från en till en (‘Humble belles lettres from one to one’, Schildts, 2002)
Blind Alley Travel Bureau
We arrive on the last arrival.
Turn the lights out when you go, the airport staff ask.
To this place you and I must travel. It was the only departure
that was called. The only place there is, said the guide.
One’s vision is blocked by the view. We’ll find no somewhere else.
‘When I fall asleep, drive the last stretch by yourselves,’
says the driver.
A last summer family lift him into
their homeward-returning back seat. More…