Culture|Book review
The poet’s birth story and growth story begins in the early stages of his family.
Prose
Jouni Inkala: The wolf consecrated to God. Siltala. 309 s.
American a master of minimalist prose Lydia Davis has written a smart and fun essay that gives 30 instructions to people who write.
One of them is, “Be sure to read poetry regularly.”
It is an important guide, especially for prose writers. If prose writers spent more time at the lyrics, readers would enjoy better-written novels.
French poet Paul Valéry said he could not be a novelist because he refused to let go of sentences like “The marquise left at five o’clock.”
Valéry dreaded prose that described events and activities in a straightforward way. He saw it as the transmission of information rather than fiction.
Fiction should be a struggle against the clichés of language and thought. A writer who uses the first words that come to mind condemns himself to be lost in his struggle.
“We have to commit to be responsible for every word, ”he writes Jouni Inkala (b. 1966) In the wolf consecrated to God.
The requirement can be interpreted as both ethical and aesthetic. The author must act in good faith, be internally truthful. But he must also keep his language expressive, write poetically to the fullest.
Inkala has previously published more than a dozen collections of poetry. A wolf consecrated to God joining him among the domestic lyricists who have slipped to the side of prose in recent years, either to stop or stay.
Unlike Henriikka Tavin, Sinikka Vuolan, Vesa Haapalan or Veera Antsalon like his colleagues, Inkala has not made a novel after all.
The new book settles in the middle ground between prose and lyricism, which feels natural to a romantic soul of a poet like Inkala. A long narrative prose might be too harsh for his sensitivity.
A wolf consecrated to God is a birth story and growth story. Its prose periods, mostly in Northern Ostrobothnia, describe Inkala’s path as a poet. In time, they extend from the early stages of the Inkala family to 1991, when the poet received a cost contract for his debut collection.
Poems taken from Inkala’s collections alternate with prose periods. They are connected in different ways to his personal and experiential history. The text leaves the connections perceptible and perceptible to the reader.
Inkala’s prose phrases reflect the lyricist’s linguistic sensitivity and sense of rhythm and sonor. Relevant flashes of mixed memory and perception are stored in the sentences.
It is a pleasure to read a text that does not recycle the generic flatness of basic prose. Inkala’s characters do not have a “heart pounding in their chest” or “blood rumbling in their ears”.
By tuning, Inkala ‘s prose has the same high – literary patina as her lyric. When one prose period came to the fore Patti Smith quote, I was almost startled as if I had come across a lewd word Antti Hyryä reading.
Inkala are not the ones who take it upon themselves to combine high and low. And I’m not saying this to blame. It’s refreshing that characters like him are influenced by a time when even marginal artists are wary of elitism accusations.
A wolf consecrated to God mixes history and myth, realism and fantasy. A wolf passes through the book in various characters.
“In the document, the name of our family is written in the form Ingolffson. Ingolf, Ingwolf, is an old Scandinavian name meaning the wolf of God, the wolf consecrated to God, ”Inkala formulates the initial myth of his family.
The wolf has a dual meaning in our culture: it is the herd animal that sometimes wanders alone. In the same way, Inkala outlines his position as a poet.
Making verses is a strange skill that sets him apart from the common people. On the other hand, it gives him access Sapfon, Danten, Ahmatovan and Mandelstamin I follow the history of poetry to the wolf pack.
“When I begin to realize that writing poems is the best tribute to the poems I read, all the unforgettable immortal poems, I promise to pay something of my debt to Dante in due course.”
Charles Baudelaire said that among the great people are a priest, a poet, and a soldier. Inkala saw in his father, a servant of God’s army, both a priest and a soldier. He was left with “the justification for existence given by poetry”.
In one prose period, Inkala describes her mother, who carries her in her womb during her last pregnancy. Two lapinnati are wondering what the child will become. One suggests a visual artist, but the other thinks the stomach shows that a poet is coming.
The scene that swells into fantasy sums up A wolf consecrated to God at the core: poetry is not a profession but a vocation, if not destiny. The argument might sound solemn when uttered at a bar counter, but in Inkala’s book it only sounds like acknowledging the fact.
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