Snow Leopard
Published on 6. December 1990
Book
Paperback/Softback
56 pages
978-1-85224-111-7 (ISBN)
Description
Tua Forsstroem is a visionary Finland-Swedish poet who has become Finland's most celebrated contemporary poet. Her breakthrough came when she was still only 30 with her sixth collection, Snow Leopard, which brought her international recognition, with its English translation by David McDuff winning a Poetry Book Society Translation Award.
Reviews / Votes
Tua Forsstroem's poems give a sense of having crystallised under a great pressure. Many of them are about grief and desertion, they are a kind of cartographical survey of the landscape of grief, exercises in renunciation and in the affirmation of loss of love, sexuality and communion with others... The love poems are sensual, concrete, nakedness against nakedness, belly against buttocks, a kneecap in the belly, the skin, the sex, the orifices, the obvious, the true. And her language has a musicality, a quiet profundity and a lustre, as in an adagietto by Mahler... She belongs to a tradition that includes Rilke, Hoelderlin, Paul Celan and the great Swedish poet Gunnar Ekeloef, in which the use of symbols and metaphors is replaced by a linguistic expression that stands in an "iconic" relation to inner reality and experience, without representing them. Instead they create their own "parallel" reality, their own linguistic universe which does not stand "in place of" something else, but forms its own unique lyrical world. -- Claes Andersson Icy intensity...aphoristic as well as mystical...a fragility that is wholly particular... Forsstroem's visions of loneliness and despair are tempered by a lyrical pluckiness...the tenderness of snow. -- Adam Thorpe * Observer *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 138 mm
Weight
108 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-85224-111-7 (9781852241117)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Tua Forsstroem was born in 1947 in Borga and currently lives in Helsinki. A much acclaimed Finland-Swedish poet, she has won major literary honours in Sweden as well as Finland. She published her first book in 1972, En dikt om kaerleck och annat (A Poem About Love and Other Things), followed by Daer anteckningarna slutar (Where the Notes End, 1974), Egentligen aer vi mycket lyckliga (Actually We Are Very Happy, 1976), Talloert (Yellow Bird's-nest, 1979), and September (September, 1983). Tua Forsstroem achieved wider recognition with her sixth collection, Snoeleopard (Snow Leopard, 1987), notably in Sweden and in Britain, where David McDuff's translation (Bloodaxe Books, 1990) received a Poetry Book Society Translation Award. Marianergraven (The Marianer Trench, 1990) was followed by Parkerna (The Parks, 1992), which won the Swedish Academy's Finland Prize and was nominated for both the major Swedish literary award, the August Prize (rare for a Finland-Swedish writer) and for Finland's major literary award, the Finland Prize (now given only for prose). Efter att ha tillbringat en natt bland haestar (After Spending a Night Among Horses) appeared in 1998. In 2003 she published her trilogy, Jag studerade en gang vid en underbar fakultat (I studied once at a wonderful faculty), whose English translation by David McDuff and Stina Katchadourian was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2006. This combines her three collections Snow Leopard, The Parks and After Spending a Night Among Horses with a new sequence, Minerals. She has since published two further collections, En kvaell i oktober rodde jag ut pa sjoen (2012), published in a bilingual edition with David McDuff's English translation as One Evening in October I Rowed Out on the Lake (Bloodaxe Books, 2015), and Anteckningar [Notes] (2018). Other awards given to Tua Forsstroem include the Edith Soedergran Prize (1991), Pro-Finlandia Medal (1991), Goeteborgs-Postens poetry prize (1992), Gerald Bonnier poetry prize (1993), Tollanderska Prize (1998) and Nordic Council Literature Prize (1998). Her poetry has been translated into several languages, including Finnish, Danish, Dutch, French, Spanish and English.