Book review | It takes guts to write as shamelessly romantically as Jouni Inkala

Poems

Jouni Inkala: Gene anthem. Bridge. 199 pp.

Demands please write Jouni Inkalan (b. 1966) like. He refuses the pessimism and sarcasm characteristic of contemporary culture. Likewise for painting doomsday visions.

About 200 pages Gene Anthem on the pages you will come across words that you would not immediately expect to find in the poetry collection of 2023: courage, hope, joy, tenderness, comfort, safety and presence.

The sun, life, time and the future are addressed as personal beings, characters in the poems.

The poems swing and ring, the final chords are really not overlooked. Gene Anthem reading it feels like a fresh return in its timelessness Eino Leinon, Lauri Viidan and P. Mustapään to poetry. The collection is aging in a good way and unashamedly romantic.

Already Inkalan previous collection Do glory, do glory! (2019) contains quite a bit of life worship. In the gene anthem laps are added, as a reaction to rough times.

It's not about dreaming or empty glimmering. Gene Anthem the Mediterranean cemetery of the drowned, the torture of prisoners of conscience, the conflict minerals of Central Africa and the Israel-Palestine spiral of revenge are encountered on the pages.

With even greater emphasis, the poet asks, can we afford pessimism and fatalism? Are they giving up and giving in to the “powers of destruction”?

“(…) and how easy is it to close / a new path to future happiness / to drown it in self-destructive / self-inflicted worries // foggy from hell / even colder / gas fogs?”

Immediately the collection in the first step Saliva sample let's consider – in the form of a joyously splattering opera libretto – the role of bodily secretions in world history.

Saliva carries with it genetic traces from comb ceramics and the Neolithic era. It is a script older than hieroglyphs and parchments. Saliva is closely related to lovers' kisses and family continuation.

What would be Sappho, Dante and By Joseph Brodsky poems without saliva as lubricant? What about sweat and tears, which became equally familiar to poets?

Saliva can mean outbreaks of communicable diseases, but just as well, the human body's own defenses, passed from mother to child.

Playfully serious the spirit of an adult fairy tale supports the entire new collection.

Inkala maps the history of the earth, the emerald green “planet of love” in the language of glaciers, folded mountain ranges, ridge heights and distribution zones.

Sometimes we peer really far, into the dance of the elements and the creation of the seas and the atmosphere. Sometimes the universe appears on the skin and merges into the everyday image.

“(…) when the filter bag is the carbon sink of space / where the spirals of the galaxies // are the tails of the primordial dog / lost by breeding (…)”

Modern man has a subconscious contact with the ancient. A jaw-dropping man in an empty apartment teleports to a time when everything is still myth and ritual. A buffalo slaughter is going on among the men of the tribe. A crescent moon lurks like a jackal's tooth above the overgrown grass.

The survivalist instincts of hunter-gatherers would no longer be needed, but living together.

Elsewhere in the collection, a dragonfly flies to the knee of the summer pants of the self of the poems. It carries with it a pantheistic message about the heath of the fern forest.

“The spotlights of equality float in the air / the glory of a million years / the complete ban on cutting ourselves apart.”

Inkala comes close Sirpa Kyyrönen (b. 1978) and Pauliina Haasjoki (b.1976) cosmic visions, utopianism and prophetic roar of ecological-feminist poetry.

Inkala would like to restore the broken balance and continue the wonderful “adventure of reproduction”. The story of humanity does not necessarily have to be over yet.

The poet the avalanche of associations and the flight of imagination are completely unstoppable, like “slowed down for people / the speed of light”.

At the core of the collection are four-leaf clovers or lucky clovers. Without them, our species prone to self-destruction and xenophobia could have destroyed itself many times.

The religiosity characteristic of Inkala is also present in the collection. There need not be a conflict between the world explanations of natural science and theology – or the visible and invisible world.

Like the deceased in the fall Torsti Lehtinen Inkala is also wary of converting others. Rather, it's about acknowledging the mystery, turning the cursed and therefore endless existential questions around in oneself.

Inkala sends in his poem greetings to another harbinger of young poetry in the 1990s, To Tomi Kontio (b. 1966).

Both opened doors to Europe and world literature as young men. The main work of the early Inkala period Unwritten (2002) reinvigorates the biographies of composers, poets and visual artists.

In their latest collections, Inkala and Kontio enjoy the fells and dangerous landscapes of Lapland instead of the metropolises of the world. In the gene anthem let's have fun summarizing our own world view of travel.

“After the Via Appia / the same goes for love along the Via Lappi.”