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Roger Holmstrom, ed. Det forgrenade ljuset: En bok om Bo Carpelan och hans diktning.

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Roger Holmstrom, ed. Det forgrenade ljuset: En bok om Bo Carpelan och hans diktning. Helsingfors: Schildts, 2006. Pp. 34-4.

Bo Carpelan (1926-), twice the winner of the Finlandia Prize (and how many others?), is a tirelessly active author: the bibliography (335-6) gives some idea of what he has accomplished. (It does not include his translations of Finnish poets, his libretti, and his anthologies.) Roger Holmstrom's assembly of tributes, interpretations, and reminiscences, begins (I, II-15) with Thomas Warburton's work-in-progress, "Om istiden" [Concerning the Ice Age], containing lines which might apply to Carpelan's extremely varied production, "en oklar harva/ som sjalva tillvaron" [an unclear tangle/like existence itself], save that "unclear" is in direct contradiction of the exemplary lucidity of Carpelan's poetic diction.

Part II defines large aspects of the work; the Swedish Academy's Horace Engdahl provides quotable words on the "dream architect" whose style "never boasts about itself" (20); by the time of Garden (1969), he found "the lyric parlando which has become his special dialect" (30); "the sense of transitoriness which is the basic mood in most of what he has written does not really explain the cheerfulness a reading of his books leaves behind" (33-4). Anna Hollsten looks into the impact of Japanese haiku on Carpelan, particularly in 73 dikter (1966), but scarcely there alone. (Like several other contributors, Hollsten writes in Finnish; Swedish translations, by Marten Westo, are provided at the end of the volume.) Madeleine Gustafsson speaks from Stockholm about Carpelan's "precision, the hearkening that creates a silence around itself" (54); in a poem from Diktamina (2003), "Han tanker pa ett ord han...

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