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

Lassi Nummi, 1957. Photo: Kuvasiskot / CC-BY-4.0

Lassi Nummi has never been afraid to say that a poem has a right to be poetry. Throughout his thirty-year career in letters he has consistently backed the special task of poetry, its right to independent life. And the other side of this is the unconstrained poem’s tutelage of whatever it is in man that is striving upwards out of the half-light into consciousness.

Nummi lets his poems ring. He is not afraid even of the pastoral, and he risks the ancient methods of the lyric. He thinks a flower garden is acceptable as a garden of flowers, and it is not proper to disparage it as a failed cornfield. With equal consistency Nummi has promoted literature as a social institution – as one of its most prominent representatives himself: a critic and chronicler with a compound eye on events in the visual arts, literature and music. Music is a special component of his own poetry, of course. More…