Booklist
*Starred Review* In the tiny introduction, Robert Bly says that the Norwegian Jacobsen (1907-94) is "so well-known in Europe, so little known in the United States." This bilingual edition of 73 poems genuinely deserves to change that situation. The translations of Bly, Robert Hedin, and Roger Greenwald (the splendid translator of Tarjei Vesaas in Through Naked Branches, 2000), whose accuracy it is quite easy to assess because Norwegian closely resembles English, give us a poet of astonishing power and beauty, whose vision of the natural world and humanity's placement in its midst is cosmically penetrative. Jacobsen seems constantly to see how one being or one action resembles another--how a person is or acts like an animal and sometimes like God. He makes no invidious judgments about such resemblances but, rather, regards the world as filled with an essential energy, with the animating principle that must be God; in this, he is very reminiscent, as Bly points out, of St. Francis and, secondarily, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Jacobsen communicates and can induce a certain calm ecstasy about everyday existence: "We don't know God's heart, / though we sense / something that showers down around us / like rain over our hands." Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
Jacobsen was one of Europe's most prominent poets. This bilingual collection spans his entire career and includes, for the first time in English, his final poems. An early champion of modernism to Norwegian poetry, Jacobsen writes of smokestacks, billboards and telephone wires alongside his beloved praises of nature and its small, forgotten things.
