Search results for "haavikko"
On Mirkka Rekola
30 June 1978 | Archives online, Authors
Mirkka Rekola. Photo: Elina Laukkarinen/WSOY
The very title of Mirkka Rekola‘s latest collection of poems, Kohtaamispaikka vuosi (‘Meetingplace the year’, Werner Söderström, 1977), reveals a theme central to Rekola’s poetry: that of unity. The time is the place. ‘I do not imagine I shall meet you this year. / This place will be here in summer.’ Rekola has a particular way of using language of the most intense concentration, so that it brings out unity between a wide variety of moods. ‘I shall meet you this year’ also means that you are this year. ‘This place will be here in the summer’ means that it is autumn and this place (a summer café) will remain deserted until the summer, but also that this place will remain there as the summer.
‘The world, a table already laid, there you see your hunger.’ ‘At the same time a little thirsty and a cowberry.‘ The correspondence of place, the synchrony of season and the general sense of undividedness produce countless pictorial and therefore concrete expressions throughout Rekola’s poetry. ‘I spread my hands / and someone yawned, / I held my fingertips in the breeze / and the boats slid into the water.’ ‘The child said to the old man: you are bent, while I am so little.’ ‘A shout is heard which is no other’s.’ Rekola’s concrete and graphical mode of expression is also based on the same philosophy: ‘Do not make a picture, everything is [a picture]’. ‘The sun, star of the night, introduces the day. And the world is so talkative in its dreams.’ More…
Concrete dreams
30 September 1986 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews
Marja-Liisa Vartio. Photo: SKS archives
Pirkko Alhoniemi on Marja-Liisa Vartio’s works
Although it is now 20 years since the death of Marja-Liisa Vartio (1924-1966), her writing remains as vivid as ever. Her books are regarded as classics of modern Finnish prose, and they constantly attract new readers, as the demands for reprints testify. Vartio’s style has not lost its freshness, nor her social vision its edge, even in the teeth of the aggressive feminism of the 1980s.
It is a little difficult to gauge the secret of her continued popularity. Although the main character of her novels is always a woman, Vartio cannot really be seen as a champion of the feminine point of view. Most essential and at the same time paradoxical in her work is perhaps the fact that, from a purely Finnish starting point, she is able to give valuable insights into the general change in world view that followed the Second World War. More…