Poetry
Tämä matka
Not translated into English
Eeva-Liisa Manner · 1956
Synopsis
Free-verse poems, dense with images, that advance through sequences of rapid, associated visions rather than by the thread of an argument, with a rare musicality. The book distrusts the intellectuality of modern civilisation and seeks in primal innocence a source of renewal. A section of black poems contains a sequence about a trial in the summer of 1955 in London, that of a woman sentenced to hanging.
Context
Its author's third collection, twelve years after the first, it was on its release an event in Finnish modernism: its refusal of strict form and its freely associated images opened a new path. According to Tuula Hökkä, the author changed publisher so that the sequence on the trial could appear in it, then herself withdrew it in the fifth edition, in 1963, which also cut other parts; the collection went through at least five editions in eight years, several of them revised. There is no French edition.
Who it is for
A collection, in Finnish; nothing to know in advance, but the reprints after 1963 do not give the text of 1956.
Prizes and reception
The book of her breakthrough, probably the most influential collection of Finnish modernism in the fifties.