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

A young lyricist wearing the mantle of a poet is a familiar sight. There is a need to be different, and a need to be the same. With two volumes of poetry behind him, there is something fundamentally poetly about Joni Pyysalo (born 1974); a poetic and sensitive soul, slightly dandyish, wearing a suit. Any roughness, any pig-headed machismo, any traces of the dry, cheerless face of an intellectual are absent.

In his first collection of poetry, Jätän tämän pimeän kalustamatta (‘I’ll leave this darkness unfurnished’, WSOY 2001) Pyysalo writes that his ‘feet are light’. Levity can be a virtue just as much as profundity. It shines through his work, in the way he asks ‘where have I left my sorrows?’. This young poet does not actively seek out extreme experiences; unlike Finnish training athletes – as it were – he does not ski across swamps in the summer or run through snowdrifts in the winter. More…

I have never heard Timo Hännikäinen read his poems out loud. On the page, the voice I hear is something like an intense but laconic whisper. There are times when the poems in the 23-year-old author’s first book, Istun vastapäätä (‘I’m sitting across from’, WSOY, 2002), skirt the edges of despair:

My thoughts are hurting,
my hands numb.
The newsprint raises a racket: even the
   unbuilt cities
already bombed.

More…

Jouni Inkala (born 1966) published his first collection of poetry in 1992. For some time it seemed that he had already developed his style to the limit, creating an intimate, concentrated tone with a characteristically calm rhythm and a pensive narrative voice. Words and images form a chain, which winds itself round a mystery: something which we can approach and redefine again and again, but which we can never fully apprehend.

In Inkala’s first collection, there are some poems which are so carefully polished, so skilful and considered, that even the dust seems to fall meticulously into place. He has gradually introduced points into his poems at which such control disappears and the writing suddenly ruptures. More…

Ten years ago, when Kaarina Valoaalto moved to the country, to the village of Toivakka in central Finland, I received a note from her:

‘350g of me has just moved, the other 99kg is still in the thick of things. The final truckload – the chickens, the ducks, the goats, the geese, the cat – is leaving tomorrow at six (a.m.) in special boxes carried by volunteers. The current has taken my heart and the rapids my brain….’

Kaarina Valoaalto embodies the myth of the poet’s ‘creative madness’ by writing the way she lives and by living the way she writes. In the fragment ‘Hometalo’ (‘The mouldy house’) from a collection of poems, Räppiä saarnaspöntöstä (‘Rap from the pulpit’, 1997) two sisters, Eine and Tyyne, move into the house of their dreams in the countryside only to be met by a sharp smell: mould. The reality in the heart of the country reveals itself to the newcomers in a tragicomic way. More…

Riina Katajavuori (born 1965) writes a poetry of quick shifts, cinematic cut, changes in point of view: in a translator’s note for Five from Finland (Reality Street Editions, London 2001), I said that they ‘incorporate voices, observations and acts of speech from the street, television, radio, lectures and books. These hums and buzzes are then distanced by being framed as laconic and ironic propositions.’

That observation still holds true for her new book. Koko tarina (‘The whole story’, Tammi, 2001). Ironic titles seem to be in vogue in contemporary Finnish poetry (e.g. Kai Nieminen’s Lopullinen totuus. Kaikesta, ‘The ultimate truth. About everything’, Tammi, 2002): while these eighty-some pages of poetry cannot literally tell any ‘whole story’, they show that Katajavuori’s work has become more expansive. It delineates a contemporary sphere of urban life in a more richly detailed way, employing an overall syntax that seems less discontinuous than before. More…