The World of Myth Magazine

Sometimes a book grows on you. A first reading can leave you cold but later you read it again and it is wonderful. That is what happened with Tua Forsstrom’s book, One Evening in October I Rowed Out on the Lake. It is a long title, which is strange, but it helps to set the tone for the book.

It was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2015, a company based in Northumberland in the United Kingdom. Since their founding in 1978, Bloodaxe have developed an incredible reputation for releasing high quality books by both well established and promising new poets that are always worth buying. They published books by the likes of John Agard and Tess Gallagher, giants in the poetry world, and helped start the publishing careers of Simon Armitage and Tracey Herd.

Tua Forsstrom is a Finnish-Swedish poet, writing mostly in Swedish, who is widely read in those countries. This book is bilingual, having the original Swedish text on the opposite page to the English translation by David McDuff, which is always nice to see even if you cannot read the original language. If you are brave, you can read the original without knowing it, and get some sense of what the words actually sounds like. But this is not the first time Tua’s work has been seen in English. Her poetry has been known for some time, but she still seems to be more of a poets’ poet than someone you might see in the big bookshops, like Seamus Heaney, Simon Armitage, Maya Angelou or someone like that.

Her work needs to be better known. This book is full of delicacy, imagery, emotion and even mysteries that reward a number of rereading’s. One of the big mysteries is how to treat about this book. There are titles for individual poems, or sections, on the table of contents pages, but their titles are really just the first lines – and so it is possible to consider this book both as a collection of strongly connected poems or as a long, single poem with many different parts.

The delicacies do not just come from the words themselves either. There is a lot of blank space on the pages when you look at each section (or poem). These blank spaces should not be thought of as a lack of content however, yes, the book is short (with both the English translation and the Swedish original this book is still about 80 pages) that blankness is symbolising silence. The empty spaces are the peace in the world, and the words are a breaking of that harmony. The words are where our focus is being directed in the wild, snowy landscape of Scandinavia. This book is set between Sweden and Finland, Stockholm and Helsinki, but it seems like the natural world is always close: lakes, deep forests and snowstorms lashing down everywhere.

This collection is like a concept album where each part builds on the last and leads onto the next, so themes are explored with deeper complexity and resonance. Reading this book is like being taken into its world where the people and places float past like ghosts but the thoughts remain in your mind. These thoughts, the observations and imagery, are evocative, and remain in the mind much like how we live our own day to day lives.

The duel themes of this collection are of the troubled human condition and the threatened natural world, and those themes intertwine as the collection goes on. You can see the introduction of these two themes on the first page or section:

The darkness, the rain, the kindness

An evening with roses that sink to the bottom

slowly a frozen street in Mejlans a perfectly ordinary evening

The darkness and kindness in humans with the rain (of sadness?) between them – in a sense the rain between those two things might be the earth renewing either itself or us. This might be the justification for the next line, where roses ‘sink to the bottom’ (of the lake in the book’s title?) and then switching immediately in the next line to the image of a ‘perfectly ordinary evening’ and a street in Mejlans - a district of Helsinki. It is like the world is both disturbed by the actions of people and is also a reflection of those same disturbances.

As the book develops these concerns, images and scenes float by – capturing an eloquent brevity that is hard to not appreciate. Even though the setting, or scene changes often, everything is united in subject and under a melancholic tone. It never feels depressing, but instead it is careful, and there is an expectation the reader pays attention to the images and what is presented:

You wouldn’t reproach me

You wouldn’t turn your face away

Hail and gravel blow in the face

The alders’ pollen blows on the water

And the image of water, of the titular lake, is forever in the background. Since this seems to take place in both Sweden and Finland, we should not think of this lake as a literal place. Instead it is a place of the imagination, perhaps symbolising the world itself. There is a connection between this symbolic lake and the poet’s experiences:

Hail and gravel in the face

The alders’ pollen blows on the water

These two things (or worlds) are compared and intertwined. Both humans and the natural world are reliant on each other. Global warming has shown this is the case: any stress or danger to one is a stress or a danger to the other.

There is another recurring image introduced after a few pages, a bundle of papers and chapters, as if while this book is being read by the reader its author is writing it. Toward the end we have a refrain of ‘The next chapter is called’, pointing us to different details we should be paying attention to in the following sections. This refrain is one of a number of phrases repeated throughout, strengthening the unity this whole book has, and when there is a repetition we are being encouraged to think about why that phrase or image is being repeated – think of it as a clue or a key to unlocking the book’s complexity.

This book (or single poem) talks about a number of different issues around modern life and our relationship with the natural world. That alone makes recommending this book easy to people who enjoy poetry, and it is from a Finnish/Swedish poet, one who will have a perspective and that is not seen much in the English-speaking world. At first, this book might seem strange, and read it in the wrong frame of mind it will leave you cold – like it did with me. However, read it with genuine curiosity and it will bloom with tight and beautiful writing. Every time you reread this book you make more connections, see more of what it is trying to do and say. It must be read a few times to be properly appreciated. Some things are hard to unpack, so they tend to be buried deep in language when we try to talk about them – making it more fulfilling when you unearth them.