Eskatos and the Stretched Necks of Stillness - by Mats Söderlund (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

with movements from us

from the mortal

to the already crossed

they who sing our songs

they who remember our lives

In 186 verses, Mats Söderlund catalogues the natural phenomena of Sweden's primeval northern woodlands. The poem leads its reader down overgrown paths, beyond the flickering of leaves and lichen, to meet "the dead" a troop of scattered fates that populate the Nordic landscape in the forms of a speaking fog, a tinkling drizzle, a faltering wind. It is this swarm of spectral destinies that the poem sets out to praise, and to mourn.

Shining of rain and gnawing of sorrow, cast from metal, snow, charcoal dust, surgical nails, and ice cold waters, Söderlund's poetry is the fragile tether to a world and past that threatens to slip through our fingers, and which no generation who seeks to survive can disclaim.

Review Quotes

"Blurbs are often full of exaggerations. But I tell you this truly: I've been carrying a dog-eared manuscript of Olivia Olsen's translation for fifteen years. In three different houses, I've kept it by my desk like a holy relic. It is one of the few books that I would dare compare to Inger Christensen's Alphabet. In five-line stanzas charged with shifting rhythms, subtle emotive interiorities, and addresses--to the moss-and-lichen-matted landscape, to the beloved, the dead, the light, the reader--Mats Söderlund goes about erasing any membrane between the material world and felt experience."

-- Forrest Gander, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Be With and Mojave Ghost

"As feverish as it is a sad meditation and swan song over the living and the dead, foreshadowing and mood. Over everything that exists simultaneously, independent of clocks and calendars.

-- Jan Karlsson, Kristianstadbladet

"There is no doubt where the reader is being taken: it is to the echo chamber where the dead and the living meet, and in this poem the collision takes place in mother nature, in a wilderness that smells and lives. . . . One is thrown from season to season, between concrete experiences and dreamlike sequences, past and present in something that could be described as a kind of controlled, automatic writing. Or a poetic tongue."

-- Anders Edwartz, Dagensbok

"As a nature poet, Söderlund celebrates new triumphs above all in the tangible depiction of autumn nature, the forest with its withered leaves, dropsy lingonberries, the fog, the raw moisture."

-- Michel Ekman, Svenska Dagbladet

"The poetic tone shifts between beautiful nature lyrics, sadness, joy, despair and anger, sometimes both biblical and Homeric in its fury."

-- Jakob Carlander, Upsala New Newspaper

"A small masterpiece. . . . The everyday world and the realm of death merge into one image in the work of Mats Söderlund. He joins a vast tradition of descriptions of the afterlife from the twelfth song of the Odyssey to Gunnar Ekelöf's poem Voices under the Earth and Willy Granqvist's Natten. One can hear echoes of the death-obsessed baroque, from Stagnelius, from Martinson (directly quoted). In a strange way, this book rises out of its literary political contemporaries and begins to speak to the classics on an equal footing. I have rarely seen a book in recent years that has so little regard for the prevailing poetic fashions."

-- Magnus Ringgren, Aftonbladet

"In non-fiction, Söderlund is personal and experimental, he weaves his own memories of mountain hiking and the male cult of achievement with new insights and perspectives. In poetry, the sound is duller and the form more austere. There is a harsher relentlessness but also a greater space. . . . Of course there are images here, but it is the rhythm and the song that dominate. The play between sound and silence."

-- Anna Hallberg, Dagens Nyheter

"In this collection. . . the mythological apocalypse alternates with the meteorological, hope coexists with hopelessness, and robins with the invasive silkworm."

-- Ale Låke, Dagens ETC

"It is with grit and poetic perfectionism that Söderlund has crafted a golden farewell letter to our dying mother earth. . . And I can't help but be captivated."

-- Nicko Smith, Nickopoet