About the Book
Tua Forsstrm is a visionary Finland-Swedish poet who has become Finland's most celebrated contemporary poet.
Her poetry draws its sonorous and plangent music from the landscapes of Finland, seeking harmony between the troubled human heart and the threatened natural world. I walked on into the forest is her twelfth book of poetry, her first since One Evening in October I Rowed Out on the Lake, the collection which followed her celebrated trilogy, I studied once at a wonderful faculty, published in English translation by Bloodaxe in 2006.
In some sense a continuation of the previous collection, her new book focuses more acutely on the themes of death and grief, and in particular the devastating loss of her beloved granddaughter. It shows her poetry's tone of inner discourse shifting imperceptibly towards a new and harsh gravity. As Sweden's August Prize jury commented on her work as a whole, this is poetry 'both melancholy and impassioned', expressing a 'struggle against meaninglessness, disintegration, destruction against death in life'.
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About the Author :
Tua Forsstrm was born in 1947 in Borg and currently lives in Helsinki. A much acclaimed Finland-Swedish poet, she has won major literary honours in Sweden as well as Finland. In 2019 she was elected a member of the Swedish Academy.
She published her first book in 1972,En dikt om krleck och annat(A Poem About Love and Other Things), followed byDr anteckningarna slutar(Where the Notes End,1974),Egentligen r vi mycket lyckliga (Actually We Are Very Happy, 1976),Tallrt(Yellow Bird's-nest, 1979), andSeptember(September, 1983).
Tua Forsstrm achieved wider recognition with her sixth collection,Snleopard(Snow Leopard, 1987), notably in Sweden and in Britain, where David McDuff's translation (Bloodaxe Books, 1990) received a Poetry Book Society Translation Award.Marianergraven(The Marianer Trench, 1990) was followed byParkerna(The Parks, 1992), which won the Swedish Academy's Finland Prize and was nominated for both the major Swedish literary award, the August Prize (rare for a Finland-Swedish writer) and for Finland's major literary award, the Finland Prize (now given only for prose).Efter att ha tillbringat en natt bland hstar(After Spending a Night Among Horses) appeared in 1997, for which she was awarded the Nordic Council Literature Prize (1998). She won the Swedish Academy's Bellman Prize in 2003 and 2018.
In 2003 she published her trilogy,Jag studerade en gng vid en underbar fakultat(I studied once at a wonderful faculty), whose English translation by David McDuff and Stina Katchadourian was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2006. This combines her three collectionsSnow Leopard,The ParksandAfter Spending a Night Among Horseswith a new sequence,Minerals. She has since published three further collections,Snger(Songs, 2006);En kvll i oktober rodde jag ut p sjn(2012), published in a dual language edition with David McDuff's translation asOne Evening in October I Rowed Out on the Lake(Bloodaxe Books, 2015); andAnteckningar(2018), published in a dual language edition with David McDuff's translation asI walked on into the forest: poems for a little girl(Bloodaxe Books, 2021). Three decades after her first Bloodaxe titleSnow Leopardreceived a Poetry Book Society Translation Award, her latest bookI walked on into the forestis a Poetry Book Society Translation Choice, which is the same award since renamed.
Other awards given to Tua Forsstrm include the Edith Sdergran Prize (1991), Pro Finlandia Medal (1991),Gteborgs-Postenspoetry prize (1992), Gerald Bonnier poetry prize (1993), Tollanderska Prize (1998) and Naim Frasheri Award (2012). She has also been nominated for the European Aristeion Prize. Her poetry has been translated into several languages, including Albanian, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Norwegian, Serbian and Spanish.
Review :
Forsström has Finland-Swedish modernism in her bloodstream but has kept a coolly timeless tone in her poetry. Her style can with some reason be called classical… What we read slowly reveals its true poetic face – the face of the lament, the elegy… It’s most beautifully and bravely done.
Tua Forsström writes poetry that comes stealing up on you. There is something curious about her poems, a way of adhering to the world that is hard to put one’s finger on.
I don’t know what I am going to need on the day that I have to face major loss, but I’m already writing a reminder to myself to go to the bookshelf then and pick out all of Tua Forsström's books.
