(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Nature personifies itself in poetry. Or, to put it another way: Poets let in this dimension that is, in reality, speechless. Karin Haugane uses the grip quite often in her latest release New sonets from the lake: She does not give birds or plants a voice, but the voice in the poems speaks to both fauna and flora (and the climate), and creates a kind of dialogue with the part of the world that is barred from the language. She often signals in the poems why this happens and how it creates poetry for her. In sonnet 62 she writes in the last two sentences:
Nature relieves with a human hand / The trees and the water and the mountains and plants / The smell of spruce, the herring, I sense // Here I go at the same time with deer and moose / Listen to the sound disappearing over the marsh / Holding your hand, stand in your clear weather
"The Land" can be seen as the genre itself, the sonnet, which spans many centuries.
One thing is the need for relief, which is found in most people. Something else is to identify the act of relief with what we linguists never reach – at least not through language. But in a sense, Haugane provides the existential barrier between man and nature that language represents, which can be recorded in the details of the poems, as in sonnet 46, first sentence: "Blue way, you stood that spring and every time". In the next: "We'll stop to see you again." Haugane's personal, intimate tone with a plant balances on the edge of the banal. But the blue road has its history of action here, a story that expresses the mystery as well as the phenomenon itself.
The life of the animals. The sonnet also has its own effect history – it extends as far back as the 1300s, to Petrarca, and goes via Spencer, Shakespeare, Baudelaire and Rilke to today's poets such as Seamus Heaney, Göran Sonnevi and Inger Christensen. The tradition is strong and clear – you can recognize a sonnet almost as easily as a dandelion on the roadside. The fourteen lines, divided into two quartets and two sets, act as a kind of visual skeleton; you see a concrete structure on the box side. And this creates expectations.
Hauganes sonets belong to this tradition, but on their own terms. The most important thing is the lake and the surrounding area, two strong and dominant factors. You almost get the feeling of an override on the part of nature, but perhaps it is better to call it influence and influence – including from animals, often in the poems' impact, where they move, sing, flock, buzz, hunt, kill, rotate, breaks into the silence of the landscape and triggers the poetic process.
The fullness of time. And this process is ongoing in these environments, often in the small and near things, like in sonnet 44:
The raspberries hang in full maturity / The field strawberries along the road to the boom / Every time I'm here the summer will be eternal / I think the longings find land for their
Animals often appear in the poems' stops, moving, singing, flocking, buzzing, hunting, killing, roaming, breaking into the silence of the landscape and triggering the poetic process.
"The Land" can be seen as the genre itself, the sonnet, which spans many centuries; the "eternal" as the process that extends through a life and gives the bearings an existential and temporal weight, which is noticeable only in the gaze that records them. I find a thought here about the interaction between botanical and human growth, between botanical and human time, in other words the awareness that is gaining in the pace of botanical growth. A linear but also progressive process, pointing to something you could call "the fullness of time". Hauganes sonnets open up for this fullness, and perhaps it happens because fauna, flora and people are like-minded organisms around the lake, a kind of poetic protection zone that lies outside society. And society is rarely mentioned, it is really only perceived as weak background noise that never breaks into the text-
ten; the present reality is effectively spelled out, which seems a consistent and conscious choice.
Life and poems. This choice avoids time experience in a concrete and radical way. In sonnet 8, a dead mother emerges from the water:
In the light of the lantern hung in a birch / Wash the mermaid pants and socks / Scrub and rinse the dress in the river's stream / I stand in the small shadows of the hardwood // Listen to the squall and the pitch of the stream / Every time I look at the river's mother / Watch I the white dissolved hands / Do I hear foreign voices at home
The phrase is as straight out of an Astrup image; the mothers at the riverside and the girl watching them. The girl sees her own future – as a woman, mother, housekeeper, forever busy with kids and heavy work. That this will never happen means little to the charge in the poem – it is an adult, mature woman who sees life in death by the flow of water from a concrete river. If you take this completely poetically, then the water flows through her as it flows around her mother as she stood in the middle of her busy everyday life. The river becomes more than just a metaphor for time, it also personifies the dead mother, releases her into her daughter. The picture is as private and pregnant as the sight of the blue road, but more complicated because the mother has given her life. And she advises her daughter in the next sentence:
Fauna, flora and people are like-minded organisms around Hauganes Lake, a kind of poetic protection zone that lies outside the community.
She said if you do not care for children / Is not the light you see over the water / Flowers in the meadow, star in the sky
But this also reveals what the children have given their mother, what senses they sharpen, how they open her up to new relationships. At the same time, it is as if the daughter is a little reluctant to acknowledge her poetic vein, perhaps because it took her time and effort to discover it, and also appreciate it. This has clearly been transferred to Hauganes sonnets, as the collection's perhaps most important building block: a building block made of time.
