Culture|Book review
The winter forest reveals endless colors when you look right.
Poems
Olli Sinivaara: Trees. Work. 41 s.
I do not know no other contemporary poet who would focus on nature as strictly and richly as Olli Sinivaara. Maybe not in all of his books, but at least in his latest collection Wood.
After all, nature pictures are in themselves the basic oats of poetry. For example, poets of romance, or already Goethe, used nature specifically to describe their internal movements.
Of course, it is known in Finland Risto Rasawho knows how to reduce. Sinivaara is just more imaginative, even dizzying. His nature expresses a relentless movement, and one cannot imagine a green door in the Rasa forest or a hearty dishwashing caterpillar.
Now the poetic images and time itself are layered: in one birch there are “many seasons of birches.”
There is no blueness a romantic in the sense in which the word is usually expressed. He makes accurate, focused, layered images. Never before have birches and pines been viewed from so many angles.
Everything is in progress, moving towards something bigger. It does fit the late 18th century early romantic theorist Friedrich Schlegelin atoxin.
“Every step opens / there are always more green attacks, / more open leaves,” Sinivaara writes about birches. The pine, on the other hand, “rises in a stream and a stream, / erupts from the bottom up, / strikes towards the height, / and back down”.
The trees have power. Detecting it broadens the perspective. In these poems, even gray gets strong tones, and green is already bursting with extraordinary vitality.
Only a few times it requires the presence of an observer. Then the self of poems emerges as a willful being.
As when trying to go deeper into the slight green of the pines, “go further until / again at some end of the conifer the green is bright”.
In the middle of a thin but emphatic work, the industry needs to expand its outlook. Fortunately, this is known, at least at the level of imagery: the “drooping sides” of snowfall pile up libraries and “dune-sand dunes”.
Yes, the views widen over the course of the collection. Some poem reminds me Tomas Tranströmer surprising parallels. Eeva-Liisa Manner mentioned once.
Sinivaara language and the images this time are simple in themselves, there is light and color, in addition to the trees also sparrows and moss.
Metaphors like “solar well crystal” and “green mockup sites” are used sparingly. Sinivaara just slides the different elements together and thus causes the familiar forest landscape to move endlessly.
He sees trees from the forest, from the trees of the forest and far behind them.
Even as the trees reach the sky and far into the sea, even though in the end the course of the sea is a “movement of motion light deep within me,” my mind is troubled as to whether there is any dimension missing from the collection.
What could it be? Perhaps a reflection on the forest as a cultural factor. The human world will stay away for a long time. One can, of course, argue against it that the function of poems is not such a reflection. The question still remains.
In any case Wood brings plenty of color to winter, even more so. For the winter-gray plains, “their neon-white platter, the new world falls / white-white.”
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