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

Tuomas Anhava. Photo: Otava

In his book Suomalaisia nykykirjailijoita (‘Contemporary Finnish writers’), Pekka Tarkka describes Tuomas Anhava’s development as a poet as follows: In his first work, Anhava appears as an elegist of death and loneliness; and this classical temperament remains characteristic in his later work. Anhava is a poet of the seasons and the hours of the day, of the ages of man; and his scope is widened by the influence of Japanese and Chinese poetry. As well as his miniature, crystal­clear, imagist nature poems, Anhava writes, in his Runoja 1961 (‘Poems 1961’), brilliant didactic poems stressing the power of perception and rebuffing conceptual explanation. The mood in Kuudes kirja (‘The sixth book’, 1966) is of confessionary resignation and intimate subjectivity.

Anhava’s literary inclinations reflect his most important translations, which include William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1959), selections of Japanese tanka poetry (1960, 1970, 1975), Saint John Perse’s Anabasis (1960), a selection from the works of Ezra Pound, published under the title Personae, and selections from the work of the Finland-­Swedish poets Gunnar Björling and Bo Carpelan.

Song of the black

My days must be black,
to make what I write stand out
on the bleached sheets of life,
my rage must be the colour of death, to make my black love stand out,
my nights must be summer white and snow white,
to make my black grief burn far,
since you're grieving and I love you 
for your undying grief.
Let the sun's rolled gold gild dunghills,
let the moon's blue milk leak out till it's empty,
              we're not short of those.
The obscure black darkness of the cosmic night 
glitters on us enough.

From Runoja (1955)

More…

Introduction by George C. Schoolfield

Birds of passage

Ye fleet little guests of a foreign domain,
When seek ye the land of your fathers again?
When hid in your valley
The windflowers waken,
And water flows freely
The alders to quicken,
Then soaring and tossing
They wing their way through;
None shows them the crossing
Through measureless blue,
Yet find it they do.

Unerring they find it: the Northland renewed,
Where springtime awaits them with shelter and food,
Where freshet-melt quenches
The thirst of their flying,
And pines’ rocking branches
Of pleasures are sighing,
Where dreaming is fitting
While night is like day,
And love means forgetting
At song and at play
That long was the way. More…

Introduction by Pertti Lassila

If you come to the land of winds, to the bottom of the sea,
there are few trees, plenty of icy wind
from shore to shore.

You can see far
and see nothing.

Around you screech the newborn plains
still wet from fog
but clear as a dream

at the edge, the sea

beneath, the deep earth
above, the wide expanse
shouts to you and to the plains

about being
it looks at you and asks

When we returned home
and leaned against the long table
we could see the simple grain of the wood
and our weariness turned into knowledge
of why we had had to go away:
to come back to see the uncharted patterns
in the table at home.

From Lakeus (‘The plain’, 1961)

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Introduction by Bo Carpelan

	A flower beckons there, a secent beckons there, enticing my eye. 
A hope glimmers there.
	I will climb to the rock of the sky, I will sink in the wave:
a wave-trough. I am singing tone, and the day smiles in riddles.

*

	Like a sluice of the hurtling rivers I race in the sun:
to capture my heart; to seize hold of that light in an inkling:
sun, iridescence.
	In day and intoxication I wander. I am in that strength:
the white, the white that smiles.

*

	To my air you have come: a trembling, a vision! I know neither 
you nor your name. All is what it was. But you draw near: a 
daybreak, a soaring circle, your name.

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Interview by Philip Binham

Birdmount

I hear a happy tale, it makes me sad:
no-one will remember me for long.
I will send a letter with nothing inside, the emptiness will reek
as the pines do, of fruit-peel and of smoke,
a scent only.
Here I have stayed a week, seven riverside days.
The river treads the mill, ah, treads the mill,
the river’s wide, this is a placid reach, the sky is near:
smoke, like the shadow of a birdflock passing, nothing else.

And now it is September:
there are more pine trees here, and more darkness too. More…