Description
Selected Poems by Knut Ødegård, translated by Brian McNeil, gathers a substantial selection of poems by one of the best known contemporary Norwegian poets, a frequent visitor to Ireland and editor of a major Norwegian anthology of Irish poetry. Described as a poet who is “intensely aware of the sacred, yet [who] visits the darkest and often the most shocking corners in his determination to sanctify those places” (Kenneth Steven, Modern Poetry in Translation), Ødegård draws on both the illuminating short lyric and the significantly longer meditation or sequence (often working in parallel to the liturgy of the Catholic Church) to blur the line between personal anecdote and visionary perception.
At once naturalistic and experimental, solemn and moving, and, by turns, hilarious and off-beat, Ødegård’s poems manage both to charm and to chill in their honesty and simplicity. In the words of VårtLand (Oslo’s daily newspaper):
“Norway does not have a court poet. But Norway does have a poet of European stature, in Knut Ødegård.” Here is poetry “that deserves all the superlatives in the critic’s vocabulary”.
ISBN 9781906614072 Paperback
140 x 216 mm, 144 pp
2009
