Sirpa Kyyrönen is one of Finland's most awarded lyricists, whose strong voice is backed by bodily experience.
Poems
Sirpa Kyyrönen: Winter sleep. Big Dipper. 122 pp.
We live a time of environmental upheavals, where a restless mind can experience even small, ultimately quite ordinary changes in the weather as signs of an inevitable disaster.
Still, like a satirist Joseph Heller wrote and Kurt Cobain sang: even if you're paranoid, they might still be after you. In our time, even normal weather conditions are linked to climate change.
Disasters are bound to happen, and literature has the great quality of being able to anticipate them – it is possible to see the fading nature in one dead wasp.
From the buffet table of literary dystopias, you can pick up both those where winter never comes and those where it never ends. Sirpa Kyyrönen The fifth collection of poems Hibernation is the first work I've read that combines both genres – and quite sovereignly.
Sometimes we live the eternal January, where everything is covered under snow, in some places we are deep in the summer that sharpens everything. The poet does not depict his scenarios externally, but directly from the body.
When reading Kyyro, you always have the feeling that you are not only at the edge of the language, but also of something strongly lived and experienced.
It's confusing that it feels like a genuine experience even when the poems involve some kind of shamanistic transformation, for example: “my body is / an ancient wolf if an ancient wolf/ turns its side, the fells tear and the ancient freezes / and the ancient freezes.”
With the repetition he cultivates a lot, Kyyrönen digs into both an individual's past and natural history.
Kyrönen is one of our most noted contemporary poets—his two previous books Aerial roots and My name is Marjatta have both been awarded major poetry prizes. He may very well be a poet who will live on in our time – and such are few and far between.
The reason for the potential vitality is Kyyrönen's always recognizable style, a unique way of perceiving the world. In it, Kaleva's spells, natural scientific observations and the challenges of modern parenting live side by side, not mutually exclusive.
Although Kyyrönen tries, for example, overwriting – from the scientific description of avalanches, he changes the word snow to sleep – or a little Anja Erämajan or Riina Katajavuoren meets pop hits and other common thoughts of our time, everything he writes looks and sounds above all like himself.
Kyrönen is those authors who always sort of write the same book, expand on the previous one. So Hibernation it is easy to recommend to those who have been addressed by Kyyrönen's earlier works. It has the same ingredients as its predecessors, but only in an even bolder, bigger implementation.
If Kyyrönen's poems are already from the firstborn Female statues since in places have broken the rules of a restrained and controlled Otava poetry listening style, at this point there are hardly any restraints left for the abundance of the text.
Fortunately, the book is divided into twelve sections, like a calendar year – and as a reading strategy, you can recommend a section or two at a time, then a break.
The book is also themed around the cycle of the year, and after finishing it you may notice, just like at the end of the year you've lived, that you have no choice but to start reading the calendar all over again.
So Hibernation deals not only with the subject of its title, for example with the help of various bear similes, but also and especially with winterlessness and insomnia. And everything else between the earth and the sky, which is now only a poetic wound to grasp.
Instead of eternal winter or summer, the closest to the soulscape of the work is perhaps eternal, foggy November – a time so featureless that only a poem can illuminate it.
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