Chickweed Wintergreen by Harry Martinson (Bloodaxe Books) Translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton

Chickweed Wintergreen by Harry Martinson (Bloodaxe Books) Translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton Reviewed by Poetry Society member Michael Stone “I embrace this as a virgin - I had never heard of Harry Martinson. Reading the collection has not affected me in any noticeable way - nor have I been transported anywhere. This is more an aggregation than a collection, as there are no clear common themes binding different poems together. However, there are some insightful, sometimes wonderful universals: "The slime that fastened my soul.....Branding everything as the law of the flesh...The determination of the fragile is no less than that of the oak....Don't waste too many years on the stone of your stubborness that no one can budge....For each generation starts its course with blindness backwards and wolfish greed forwards....The loaf's purpose is to feed you, The flower you can buy means that life is worth iving....When the feint rippling of our rage has faded out in the Milky Way...The urge that accompanies all life...Life is fully occupied being what it is: an attempt on paradise...." Reviewed by Poetry Society member Maria Jastrzebska Chickweed Wintergreen's other name is Arctic Starflower. Acclaimed translator Robin Fulton wisely uses the woodland flower’s common name. This is in keeping with the disarmingly simple and direct language of Nobel prizewinning Swedish poet Harry Martinson's beautiful poems. His early work especially is populated by creatures and events of extreme climates from his years as a seaman: storm petrels, albatrosses, hurricanes, driftwood. His “wheezing” steam collier put me in mind of Whitman’s “batter’d and wrecked” Columbus. Published mostly between 1929 and 1973 Martinson is also a deeply political poet employing allegory and metaphor to decry the environmental effects of industrialisation and the barbarism of the so-called civilised world. Nature is meticulously observed, sketched with the light touch of his own drawings which punctuate the book. However Martinson is sharply aware how the rural idyll belies the toil of ordinary people such as The Thrall Woman pounding grain “to live a few more days of summer” or the “silent lie” behind closed doors in Home Village . In later poems close observation is infused with an exquisite near mystical quality as he celebrates “nature’s very tiniest work”, the elusive language of “hurrying water’” in Millwheels , of whispers in forest or grass, of “snow-thoughts”. Reviewed by Poetry Society member Adam Elgar The 1974 Nobel Laureate, Harry Martinson, was a Joseph Conrad of lyric verse, who ran away early to sea and celebrated rural Sweden all the more vividly for having abandoned it. His early work is at home with “hard-knuckled ploughmen staring seawards” and on the open sea: “the fleet’s funnels/ trap starlight in their soot.” His magnum opus , Aniara , anticipates the space age in a long sequence of meditations on hubris and loss. The project has divided opinion, and is itself divided between the ravishingly lyrical (“evening scarcely dims/ before the flute-clear cuckoo calls sweet Aino”) and the 1 jarringly didactic: “defence is possible against almost/ anything... But no defence is possible against man.” Robin Fulton’s translations are less strained (to this reader) than his Tranströmer, and Martinson’s observant tenderness brings out the best in him: “Have you seen a steam collier come from a hurricane?... Snorting, it ties up at the sunlit quay, deadbeat, licking its sores, while the steam in the boiler tubes thins away;” and best of all perhaps in the evocations of childhood absorption which are this poet’s spiritual core: “Towards the cowberry distance there in summer’s own parish my dream migrates like a crane in spring.” Reviewed by Poetry Society member Nick Rogers I enjoyed some of the earlier poems. The storm battered steamer in Have you seen the steam collier , The Breaker carving its way through Northern ice. Taut, muscular poems . However, what I think I’ll take away most from this collection is the sense of the Nordic forest where life goes on timelessly, a harmony beyond the human. There’s a sensibility that it is hard to imagine in a British writer. In Britain, the countryside is intimately bound up with human life. Here, the humans seem to be fleeting presences. Sometimes they leave a trace. An apple tree remembers through “sap memories” the girl who picked apples a hundred years ago. A few buildings and farm implements rot. The natural world, barely ruffled, carries on. Revealingly, in the prose poem Paradise , paradise is a deserted village in the forest. There is a sense of longing in the descriptions of the humming primeval stillness of the forest, where the bats swoop for midges, the snail goes about its business and the juniper tree “clamped between grey stones” waits for winter. My only criticism is that occasionally the poems spell their message out a little too overtly. Reviewed by Poetry Society member Helen Wood I found Martinson's work a breath of fresh air: nothing obscure, nothing rarified, just great wafts of measured contemplation, of political and social comment bound into exact imagery of his homeland which has made me see my own world differently. The visual strength of lines like: “ ... through the yellow oceans of the rye/runs a gentle murmur of bread” or “the bare tabletop of the pier” is taken across right into war with the hideous vividness of “the sea dissolved the driftwood of the human corpses”. There is no sentimentality in his vision of the increasingly poverty struck or abandoned countryside, but an acceptance that life goes on, even if it is not human life, and I think I particularly liked his sense that we humans are only a part of the richness of life. The beauty of the countryside lies in “nettles are in bloom” - it is his role to mediate these observations to the reader. There is a tremendous space and stillness within many of the poems, not just the later ones but right from his early writing, an awareness of our transience - absolutely clear in The Dragonflies where he mentions “the faint rippling of our rage”. 2 I appreciated the occasions when we were provided with a parallel text so that we could begin to understand the sound riches of the poetry which is so impossible to recreate in another language, but it is the visual imagery, and the understatedness of it I love. 3 .

Load more