Books from Finland - A literary journal of writing from and about Finland.

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…