Simon Grotrian pours out the entire contents of the horn-of-plenty
Illuminations in the eye of the storm

Nominated for the Nordic Council´s Literature Award

Simon Grotrian
Korstogets lille tabel (The Multiplication Table of the Crusade)
Borgen. DK

By Ingrid Elam

To read Simon Grotrian when you have Swedish poetry and the debate on Swedish poetry from the past few years in you baggage is like boarding a plane in wintry Sweden and arriving a few hours later in a warm and windy country. Here, there is no scepticism against metaphor; here, poetry does not look like prose torn to shreds; here, the perspective is never low, the tone never commonplace.
To a Swedish reader, Grotrian’s poetry may bear a resemblance to the early prose of Björn Ranelid: a surrealistic surge, a storm of images, a religious keynote and a clear and urgent form of address. Grotrian speaks to a „you“ that is not only expected to listen, but also to accept becoming part of a „we“:
And you, who stayed away longer than the beginning
Step onboard
Seroquel states closer
to fervour.
We bleed like a fakir of the oceans.

The „you“ in Grotrian is sometimes almost identical with an ‘I’, and then again sometimes it is closer to the Christ who has a strong presence in his poetry, but who may also be elevated to „The Lord“, in which case the „you“ comes nearer the reader. The positions are shifting, but the poet and his baffled readers remain: is this hymn-writing or postmodernist reductionism, or both? What is he saying? What does this mean?
That question is not easy to answer, although there are coherent themes in Korstogets lille tabel (The Multiplication Table of the Crusade): this is about Gomorrah and Golgotha and the decay of the sacred, about death and growing old, but Grotrian is the kind of poet who pours out the entire contents of the horn-of-plenty at once, leaving the reader to find the gems for himself. At such a time, the trick is to simply stand there in the storm of images and trust in the existence of revelation, that the moments of epiphany will come if you dare open your senses to them.
For some readers, those moments may come in the form of maxims; Grotrian is drawn to the kinds of paradoxes that can put the brakes on the turning wheels of existential anguish for an instant:
If I am unborn
I cannot die either
Or:
When our hands are folded
It is God that we are greeting.

There is a sudden calm in lines such as these, a calm in the eye of the storm, or the eye of God, where the reader may rest and perhaps also recognize something. Is there not a resonance here of Sunday school and Pär Lagerqvist?
My own favourite gems are of another kind, they emerge as sudden illuminations in what is obscure and unintelligible. Following upon impenetrable and anguished lines such as „Nerve-sharp bees lick away your guilt“ and „You watch the brain float around in the well“, there is an utterly luminous image:
The sunset spreads like ashes
the church’s explosion of ravens

And I can see all the ravens as flakes of soot against the burning horizon, dark, yes, but also an entirely new vision of a familiar sight. Grotrian may be something of an odd bird on the Danish poetry scene, but he builds his colourful world from things that we recognize from both poetry and reality: birds, church steeples, fire and water, turmeric and alarm clocks. The more I read, the more I discover, and my „teeth spread out across the face“, both because I, too, am growing old and because it is possible to smile at it.

Ingrid Elam is dean of the School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University.