Poetry
Solgrönt
Not translated into English
Gunnar Björling · 1933
Synopsis
A motley book, in which several manners collide. Erotic invocations of extreme concentration, in which skin, mouth, breast and lips recur. Poems of intoxication and vital impulse taken from taverns. Long programmatic poems that announce the author's universalism and an “unfinished god”. And, in the last part, a bouquet of sonnets that remain in the poet's first manner. Minimalism meets expansion there, mysticism the praise of life's banalities.
Context
His fourth collection, it was his breakthrough and remains the clearest example of his first manner: brutal metaphors, a haunting rhythm, long poems by turns provocative and argumentative, grammar and syntax taken apart. The relativist thought of Westermarck and Dadaism pass through it. From 1938 his language changes: he writes only short pieces, assembled in sequences so long that a whole collection reads as a single poem. The book has been translated into Finnish under the title Auringonvihreä, and reissued in Sweden with a preface by Anders Olsson.
Who it is for
A collection in Swedish, and one of the most difficult in that language; one must give up looking for complete sentences.
Prizes and reception
The book of his breakthrough; when the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland rewarded it after the war, its chairman resigned in protest.