Archive for March, 2008

Hot and cool

30 March 2008 | Authors, Reviews

The spiritual map of poetry contains many levels, and poetry happens in many decades at once.

Rakel Liehu (born 1939) published her her first poems in 1974, but she writes as freshly as any young poet of the 21st century, often about the same concomitant themes of womanhood and writing.

Liehu has the same spirit as the German dadaist Kurt Schwitters, who was a great supporter of ‘doing things differently’. There is a constant frenzy of doing things differently in her poems that reaches beyond genres. She couldn’t care less about the expectations of the times or of the mainstream. Even under threat of isolation, conventionality is anathema to her. More…

Change the words

30 March 2008 | Fiction, poetry

Poems from Bul bul (‘Bulbul’, WSOY, 2007). Introduction by Karri Kokko

Opening

Which street was it? A question in a poem doesn’t demand an answer, it’s
itself, like that accurate filter, a blood-soaked liver –

The city was a giant, budging my brains, the fireworks’
ash trailed down to earth, the clowns screeched, a book’s face
was waiting like a child’s face,
and they began swarming out, releasing themselves from signposts,
neon signs, from the pages of a closed book (smelling of a dried
ranunculus), from graves, from a woman’s abhorrent womb – More…

Finnish oddities

30 March 2008 | Children's books, Fiction

Aino Havukainen & Sami Toivonen: Tatun ja Patun Suomi (This is Finland, Otava 2007)

Sauna

More…

Tough cookies

30 March 2008 | Authors, Interviews

Aino Havukainen and Sami Toivonen’s quirky duo Tatu and Patu delight readers of all ages. Interview by Anna-Leena Ekroos

Once upon a time there were two remarkably round-headed, thin-haired brothers. They were named Tatu and Patu and their principal personal attributes were curiosity and adventurousness. In the boys’s hometown of Outola (‘Oddsville’), things were done a little differently from around here. So when the boys leave their stomping grounds on an expedition into our world, perplexity and amusing situations ensue. More…