"three-toed gull" by Jesper Svenbro (Northwest University Press, 2003)

Poems from Kenyon Review, Parnassus, Chicago Review, etc. Most are at least a page long.

The Postscript by the co-translator Lars-Hakan Svensson is revealing -

• "The Starlings" ... begins with the speaker watching a swarm of starlings ... in Rome ... as [] the starlings settle down to sleep the speaker is reminded of a famous passage in Virgils's Aeneid that compares the souls of the dead to birds ... this association momentarily results in writer's block dispelled by the sudden appearance of a soldier who ... comments ... "They certainly know how to look after themselves!" ... the speaker imagines that the birds [dream of] a beautiful October afternoon ... This ... vision conjures up another presence ... that of a deceased friend ... Ludovica Koch, who was a connoisseur of ... Gutar Ekelof who, in his turn, wrote magnificant poems about Italy ... in the final lines ... flying up from a field, the starlings cause the two friends to "look into the sun" . [This poem] contains several features of Svenbro's mature manner (p.121)
• In the late 1960s and 1970s strong political pressures were brought to bear on Swedish poets (p.123)
• Svenbro had discovered Ponge partly through ... Printz-Pahlson ... who taught Scandinavian literature for many years at Cambridge University (p.124)
• Svenbro's discovery of contemporary Italian poetry, which after decades of restraint underwent a remarkable metamorphosis in the 1970s: suddenly it was possible to write "orphic poetry, political poetry, narrative and gestural poetry" ... A Roman poet Valentino Zeichen [] alerted him to various ways in which linguistic material of a supposed nonliterary kind could be incorporated as poetry (p.124)
• the previously restrained or concealed autobiographical impulse emerges as the dominant force, relegating the metapoetic or mimopoetic (p.125)
• Regrettably, neither Svenbro's very early work nor his most recent book is included, as they pose difficulties that the translators have not felt able to master (p.126)

A number of the early poems are what the Flash world would describe as braided pieces - 2 narratives are interlaced.

• In the history of the human voice the tendons of the skeleton/ form the sinews, the abutments of different vowel systems/ articulated around a constantly variable/ yet incorruptible consonant; the skeleton itself (p.7)
• So the poem is only the shroud left on the ground/ where its miserable crumpled heap is only a measure/ of victory announced by the butterfly's wings/ now ablaze in the sun when it finally flies out of language/ affirming its brilliant and dizzying love (p.10)
• The incident of the Soviet submarine in Goose Bay/ raises the issue of how we want our archipelago poetry to look ... Swedish literature's long-standing prioritisation of the air-force/ has gradually resulted in a visually advanced poetry (p.11)
• Seeing that so-called nature poetry ever since Romanticism/ is best defined as a thoroughly realized simile/ whose epic context simply has gotten lost,/ we repeat on this winter day the experiment/ of taking our stand in a simile near the middle of the Iliad (p.22)

I find some of these pieces interesting, and some other fragments (like "For a moment I am a prisoner/ of the poem I am writing", p.118) interesting but I can't bring myself to like any of the poems. "The Starlings" comes closest.