Book review | Everything is perishable – and that is the joy of the whole thing, the poet says

Poems

Anja Erämaja: Someone always goes first. WSOY. 94 pp.

Anja Erämajan poetics is of its own kind. It says directly and clearly but with exciting, rich twists. In the sixth book of poems of Erämaja Someone always goes first the contrast of life and death builds with rustling and a good pulse.

“Mother is dead, buried, on the ground like the earth / rots, melts, turns.”

The work delves into the garden of death like numerous poetry books before. The mother’s death, first passing away, is the subject of the work’s sadness and renunciation. The book reminds me in many ways Hannimari Heinon of the work Binding forces (Ntamo, 2023), where the death grief of a parent is to be worked on.

Perhaps death and burial make you think about what everything grows from. From the tracks, sure. In the concretization of death, the leafy and flowery cycle of the earth is a very long-lived image. Culturally sustainable – or clichéd, depending on the point of view.

Implementation of the wilderness house the subject area is specifically abundant, leafy and flowery. Even from the list-like abundance, an insight often breaks out, based on language or everyday observation. With these fins, poetry that approaches the reader, is born, funny and spirited, for example from the roots:

“How they crave, how they know, no one can leave here / very far from the earth’s chamber, colorful veins, heartbeats, / holding on until the last seconds.”

The will to live is also present. The speaker of the poem gets sick, cancer is found. And he wants nothing more than to live, and hopes, very relatably: “I want to drink thousands more cups of coffee”.

Someone always goes first is a suitable dish for fresh but sensitive obituary poetry. Light verses chosen for the deceased could be, for example, these: “so I listen to the song of the sky, I learn / how the sea beats the shore, the chorus continues, it does not end, the person ends, interlude”.

Everyday and life in it, of course, and generations. And then there is the earth and the Earth – how life in us and everywhere here, bustles and circulates. Life’s turn is always somewhere, and Someone always goes first is a paradisiacal picture of living and dying in the midst of climate concern.

Poetry is also the art of reality roaring in the background.

Although Erämajan the poems strike and convince as texts, Someone always goes first has not quite found its character as a body of work. In the graphic design of the work, attention is drawn to the elegant font used in the titles and only in uppercase, with an Art Nouveau spirit.

It seems special, but it’s just a decoration, an image. The font doesn’t find its meaning as a whole, although it’s really nice in its place. The problem permeates the entire poem.

Whereas the level of the poems is easy to take in, the entirety of the book doesn’t quite take shape. When I read through it, I carry the knowledge of the inevitability of death with me in the lushness of my home and the north.

Then the scenery changes, to everyday life, so deep into everyday life that we rake and talk with the child about the goal boards. The circle closes, when everyday life rhythms both life and death. When my mother died, I finished the poem with a wool sock and returned the books.

Maybe I miss it a more solid anchoring in knowledge, emotion or language, instead of the work eventually going down a conventional route.

It works in the predictable areas of death and nature poetry, it doesn’t stretch poetics or imagination beyond well-worn boundaries. Still, it ends up emphasizing the joy in the impermanence of everything, and beautifully:

“Everything this side of joyous location-aware participation.”

It must be admitted that there is not enough rejoicing over the limitations of a living being.