Grasp - Release

Nominated for the Nordic Council´s Literature Award

Anna Hallberg
på era platser [take your places]
Albert Bonniers Förlag. S

By Helge Torvund

The final section of Anna Hallberg’s second novel bears the Obstfelderish title „Liv“ [Life], and is an almost fifty-page-long collection of poems in itself. Its subject is something as unlikely as an ordinary, standard-fit public Swedish floor. Concisely, precisely and, in fact, amusingly and enjoyably, Hallberg writes about this humdrum, average floor which, from time to time, we all find ourselves walking over.
What did that fine dust belong to originally? If we walked over the floor barefoot, how much dirt would we pick up? What sort of words can embody up the different characteristics of the floor? The pages of poems blend into one another, alternating between whimsical and existential questions.

Many beginnings
„på era platser“ or „take your places“ to use one possible English translation, prompts the reader to think: there are lots of beginnings here. The Hungarian poet Sándor Csóori says: „If a poem wants to tell us something, it doesn’t do it by showing us something that’s already ended, finished, but by capturing our nascent curiosity“. The other poems in the book frequently arouse our curiosity. For a Norwegian some of these lines and methods will doubtless conjure up typically Norwegian associations. For instance, I find references to the most well-known Stein Mehren poem „Jeg holder ditt hode“ [I Hold Your Head] (p. 25) and the title of a collection by myself, namely „Kitty K.“ (p. 46).
The slightly random pickings from everyday exchanges along with absurder moments like: „Yes, or in the ear“ or „D’you think they’ll remember to pull that bit of string?“, remind me of the Norwegian poet Helge Rykkja. Hallberg constantly creates slightly off-hand contrasts and a sense of recognition by joining fragments of speech together from different sources.
In „plastpåsarna vid lekparken“ [plastic carrier bags in the playground], which is the most experimental poem, I was gripped by a sense of the past, rather than setting off into new, virgin territory. What’s fascinating about the concretism of the 1960s and the I-less poems of Bengt Emil Johnson was their capacity to make the reader a creative partner. The problem is that the loose formal structure also feeds into less stimulating work, too much in thrall to the haphazard.

Layout effects
Because the various parts of this book are so dissimilar it tends as a whole to sprawl and to lack coherence. What does hold the book together all the same is her sense of the different places, to which the title refers, and that it is all Hallberg’s work. Not so much in the shape of a poetic „I“, more an intrinsic linguistic awareness and sensitive emotional background. She uses layout effects to press home this heterogeneity. The various headings are in italics, medium bold or capitals. She uses different font sizes to separate lines and paragraphs. All of which creates an impression of fragmentary and half-glimpsed observations and reflections. They take hold, let go, continue. It suits the content, whose strength lies precisely in its mirroring of our cultural landscape, the sombre poetic images conveying intimate, psychological messages like „the glowing hate from daddy’s penis“, interspersed with utterly trivial questions like „D’you have to wear a cap when you work here?“.
There is the constant exchange between showing what language can grasp and how we need to let go of our expectations to gather whatever’s happening. Slightly absurd fables in prose keep on alternating with cookery book advice: “Olive oil is good”.
This is by any accounts a book one dips into, not reads through. A book to which one returns to see if it actually said what one imagined it did. And a book which has one of the most essential things poetry can have: she gets us to listen to what ordinary people actually say, and marvel at what is written about us.

Helge Torvund is a writer and poetry reviewer for Dagbladet

Translated by Chris Saunders