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

Poems from Niin kovaa se tuuli löi (‘So bitterly the wind struck’, Tammi, 2004)

Lord, you've promised to come, don't hang back.
     Here we are already, sitting, me and the dogs,
   and the others that have to go.

Jesus, poor thing, didn't know whom to bloom for,
  just kept on lugging his cross, pretty as a pony.
    He came and shot us down,
   bullets flying without his even noticing.
      The night was gifted with roses
        full of love.
 Through a woman we came here, through a man
    we leave.

More…

Poems from Taivaan mittakaava (‘The scale of the sky’, Otava, 2004)

Architect

Behind your back the city’s changing,

across the sky a crane’s swinging
ready-made components.

A tie splits the architect’s white shirt,
his paired limbs and individual organs,
two lanes, left and right.

You and I are precisely planned.
Even now we’re on a ruler’s edge. More…

Poems from Valekuun reitti (‘The path of the false moon’, WSOY, 2004). Introduction by Herbert Lomas

At first light I put my hand
     in the hollow of a white willow –
once someone's cigarette box
had been left there –
     now a bird flew out
going seaward.

Touch of a wingquill on the back of my hand.
     It flew higher.
          In the evening
I felt its touch on my shoulder blade.

More…

Poems from Vaaksan päässä taivaasta (‘A span away from heaven’, Teos, 2004)

In the evenings they lit a candle on the cat’s grave
In the daytime they made a cosmological model
with a skipping rope
feet tapped the rhythm and its shadow
the rope slapped against the street
once in a while a rock flew
against a concrete wall
plunged from the oval galaxy’s edge
to the edge of space. More…

Poems from Olen tyttö, ihanaa! (‘Wonderful, I’m a girl!’, Tammi, 2003)

I’m hanging from the Antonovka branch

I'm hanging from the Antonovka branch
                   upside down, my hair stretching upwards,
   I swing, the lawn sky
flies past, it's raining tree-trunks,

the fish bring Grandad in from the lake,
the cows have herded Grandma from the pasture,
the dough kneads the hand on the table-top.

The potatoes have lifted us from the earth,
         the fields plough me,
           the grass is creeping into Felix,
    bones gnaw at Fido, beneath the currant bushes
                            worms peck at the chickens.

The apple has bitten Eve,
  hunger devours me with each mouthful,
and death comes too,
  breathing the air from my lungs,
                                         then passes:
  I drop down to my palms
on to my feet

More…

Prose poems from Huoneiden kirja (‘A book of rooms‘, Otava, 2003)

The ladies’ room

Behind the shining mirror twin girls are squealing, they disappeared inside the walls long ago. They had plaits, red pompons, bad moods – all of them moulded and twisted by wire coathangers from the very start. They gouged the house full of passageways, they hollowed out the paper walls with silver christening-spoons. They disappeared between the stairs on the staircase, saying: evil’s a gateway onto a void with hundreds of gateways inside. Now they’re in this room, behind this mirror. Now the sun’s rising over the firtree-tops, creeping step by step higher towards the overarching sky. Inside us there are two hundred girl-embryos, the girls shout, they’re handicrafts fashioned by themselves like us: out of pearls, blood, splinters of mirror, it’s these we were made of. If you don’t find us, you’ll not sleep a single night. Until you do you’ll wander about the house, astray with each memory, until your hands are thinner than your words, the days slenderer than your hands. More…

When Eira Stenberg (born 1943) began writing in the heat of of Africa, her pen sank into the paper like a tattooing needle into the skin, she says. Her experiences there are alive in her book of poems entitled Siksi seurustelen varkaiden kanssa (‘That’s why I consort with thieves’, Tammi, 2002)

The journey

Wheels clattering, landscape speeding by the window to the past
notebook on lap she understood the journey’s essence,
that it’s a lap she lost in early childhood
when she stood up and set off walking
away from the arms that had carried her from room to room
giving views from on high as if from a mountain:
the apparitions of things, the furnishings, the tints of pictures
and the bedroom mirror they arrived in,
mother and a child, a holy image she met
again in churches and on altars everywhere
as if it were the purpose of the journey: More…

Poems from Vain tahallaan voi rakastaa (‘You can only love deliberately’, WSOY, 2001)

The musicians of Bremen (Self-portrait as a five animals)

People say man’s above all the other beasts.
I decided to prove that – and first turned poet
and then painfully became a flying horse, celebrating its freedom
on great shivering brawn. They captured me and put me to pulling
loads, and, seeing I endured everything docilely, they said,
He’s like the Giant Atlas, or Hanuman, the upholder of the world.
And they whipped me and sat on my back and finally
buried me alive. I became a pig and gorged my bellyful and my senses full
and it horrified people, who said: He’s a disease, an epidemic, Death itself.
And they cut my ears and blinded me and sliced my belly in two.
And I turned into a dog and learned everything I was taught and they said,
He’s completely without a will, like the angels, like an ascetic, and a prophet.
And they drove me out to wander the streets and the wildernesses. And in the desert
I turned into a tiger and people shouted in terror
What on earth
has God done – look, he’s Satan himself. And they shot me
from an elephant’s back. And I died into a cock and people woke up and shouted,
The healer of the world! And whenever I sing, because I only sing untold-to,
People wring my neck. More…