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

Photo: Irmeli Jung

Names or cultural references suffice to convey meaning to the reader: classics, movie stars, brand names, myths and Joe Bloggs coexist in them. In this sense, Jarkko Laine’s poems are ‘cultural’ and testify to a belief in a shared cultural reality and in the existence of a shared civilisation. Furthermore, they assert, in an Eliotian spirit, that the canon of ‘great books’ and great works is still alive. In the manner of a learned humanist, Laine is not afraid to appear pedantic but is willing to emphasise his points with italics or footnotes whenever necessary. More…

Leena Kirstinä on the iconoclastic and pioneering poet – for children and adults – Kirsi Kunnas

Fifty years ago the poet Kirsi Kunnas liberated Finnish children’s poetry from its boring didacticism: she revived ancient nursery rhymes, fables and epigrams that can parody human frailties and fabricate fairy-tale social criticism. Her hilarity, brilliance and linguistic virtuosity have charmed readers of all ages.

A post-war Finnish modernist, Kunnas (born 1924) published her début volume, Villiomenapuu (‘Crabapple tree’, WSOY), in 1947. In the 1950s her children’s volume, Tiitiäisen satupuu (‘The Tumpkin’s wonder tree’, 1956), rejuvenated children’s poetry. Her translations of the classical English nursery-rhymes in Old Mother Goose helped her to enhance the ways of writing fantasy, humour and nonsense. More…

Photo: Linda Stråka

The wind blows a great deal in Catharina Gripenberg’s second collection of poems, Ödemjuka belles lettres från en till en (‘Humble belles lettres from one to one’, Schildts, 2002). In the first poem we meet three siblings who, on their way across a bridge, are scattered and thrown about by the wind. In another poem a house blows away as a family sit around the dinner table – an event that does not, however, give rise to feelings of vulnerability, but becomes an opening to the world instead.

Perhaps the wind can be seen as an image of Gripenberg’s poetic strategy, a poetry in which nothing is really held in place and where anything may happen. Behind this strategy one senses a resistance to rigidity and outward fixation and a defence of the power of the imagination and of poetry’s ability to create freedom. More…

Sirkka Turkka. Photo Tomi Kontio

‘Everyone’s always in a hurry. In the grave it stops.’

In her new volume Sirkka Turkka (born 1939) appears as an even greater and more pitiless poet. Niin kovaa se tuuli löi (‘So bitterly the wind struck’, Tammi, 2004) – her twelfth volume, the first having being published in 1973 – is an unadorned and searching portrayal of death and the grief that accompanies it. It takes a thoroughly mature poet to handle major feelings as uninhibitedly as she does, and without letting the empathetic glow fade under the documentation.

Animals have always played an important role in Turkka’s somewhat melancholy but vital verse, with its highly individualised concrete language. In 1987 she received the Finlandia Literature Prize for her Tule takaisin, pikku Sheba (‘Come back, little Sheba’, Tammi, 1986; see Books from Finland 4/1988). Little Sheba was a small dog, one of the poet’s dearest friends. Turkka has worked as a stable manager, and horses are frequently central in her work. Domestic and farm animals are always a presence, and here they appear as tokens of the fragility of life and mortality. A hare, a horse, a dog and a lamb are among the animals whose deaths are dramatised. More…

Photo: Irmeli Jung

The calm, precisely defined atmosphere of Sanna Karlström’s poems is interlined by the fragility and seriousness of the ‘I’, suggesting a certain sorrow. The clarity and purity of Finnish modernism’s tradition shows up in her controlled style; one may detect glimpses of the classically modernist images of Paavo Haavikko (1931–2008) in her poems. Karlström’s collection, Taivaan mittakaava (‘The scale of the sky’, Otava, 2004) does consider ‘the scale of the sky’, but her gaze is more centred on what is close at hand, the small. The ‘scale’ she works on is that of windows and rooms, which reflect both the self and ‘the other’. More…

Photo: Irmeli Jung

Mirkka Rekola was a minimalist before minimalism was invented. Eschewing any poetic flummery, her passion has generally been infused into brief, enigmatic notations of moments: reports of flashes of heightened awareness.

She records ‘the best thing I remember’ – captured as it flies. It may be the sight of someone intensely loved in some very ordinary action – but enhanced by an almost visionary light: a new rug is being hugged: ‘When you were embracing it I / almost felt it was breathing, / that rug, it breathed that autumn’s colours, and this one’s.’ And nature isn’t separate from us: ’embracing a tree we grow.’ Or: ‘You’ll never get such tenderness / ever as from the snowfall’s / thousands and thousands and thousands of moments.’ More…

Photo: Heini Lehväslaiho

If I had to describe Tomi Kontio’s new book of poems, Vaaksan päässä taivaasta (‘A span away from heaven’, Teos, 2004, page 93) in ten words or less, I would say that it is a succession of deep breaths taken between catastrophes great or small.

Since I have a few more words at my disposal here, I’ll also say that it meets every expectation set up by his previous three volumes of poetry: sonorous language, an essentially Romantic but not egocentric worldview, and extraordinary skill in combining straightforward narrative with spectacularly effortless runs of metaphors, as in these lines from the poem ‘Pietà’: More…