Fire & Ice: Nine Poets from Scandinavia and the North brings together a selection of exciting and innovative Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic poets whose voices have not been widely heard in English translation. Indeed some have not been translated into English before.
Poets included are Katarina Frostenson, Lene Henningsen, Birgitta Trotzig, Willum Peder Trellund, Einar Mar Gudmundsson, Inger Christensen, Birgitta Lillpers, Stein Mehren, & Didda. Translations are by Didda, Bernard Scudder and Gordon Walmsley.
"The world of the north, of Scandinavia and the islands, is a world in which the veil between seen and unseen worlds has its very own quality of transparency. This quality has its pendant in what we call intuition. That the people of the European north have for centuries been esteemed for intuitive qualities should come as no surprise to the readers of these poems...
Each of these poets has immense courage. That will become clear to readers as they make their way through this book. The process of fashioning poems is a process of fashioning the individuals who write them. Through fire and ice."
Gordon Walmsley, editor
It is hardly a secret that European poetry (for one example) is infinitely more stylistically, as well as politically, exciting and imaginative than our own. Even a half-baked amateur translator such as myself knows that. Hats off, then, to Salmon Poetry, for producing a handsome anthology of Scandinavian and 'North' poetry in English for us..."
Fred Johnston
Editor Gordon Walmsley is an American poet and long-time resident of Copenhagen. He is the author of four collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Terebinthos (Salmon 1999).
Poets included are Katarina Frostenson, Lene Henningsen, Birgitta Trotzig, Willum Peder Trellund, Einar Mar Gudmundsson, Inger Christensen, Birgitta Lillpers, Stein Mehren, & Didda. Translations are by Didda, Bernard Scudder and Gordon Walmsley.
"The world of the north, of Scandinavia and the islands, is a world in which the veil between seen and unseen worlds has its very own quality of transparency. This quality has its pendant in what we call intuition. That the people of the European north have for centuries been esteemed for intuitive qualities should come as no surprise to the readers of these poems...
Each of these poets has immense courage. That will become clear to readers as they make their way through this book. The process of fashioning poems is a process of fashioning the individuals who write them. Through fire and ice."
Gordon Walmsley, editor
It is hardly a secret that European poetry (for one example) is infinitely more stylistically, as well as politically, exciting and imaginative than our own. Even a half-baked amateur translator such as myself knows that. Hats off, then, to Salmon Poetry, for producing a handsome anthology of Scandinavian and 'North' poetry in English for us..."
Fred Johnston
Editor Gordon Walmsley is an American poet and long-time resident of Copenhagen. He is the author of four collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Terebinthos (Salmon 1999).