The Baltic Quintet: Poems from Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Sweden
edited by Edita Page
Hamilton: Wolsak and Wynn Publishers Ltd., ISBN 978-01-894987-26-4, 192 pp., $25 paper.

When Edita Page, at the beginning of her Foreword, states that "little is known about Northern Europe and even less . . . about the poetry of those countries," she is not just making conversation. Until now, it was thanks to poets such as Patrick Friesen, who took the trouble to translate some of their work that we knew anything at all other than the various mythological legends attached to those lands. But, as she says, "the power and music hidden in the metaphors of Eddas, Kalevala and Kalevipoeg are still present on the streets of Vilnius, Tampere or Uppsala. The metaphors may have changed and multiplied in all their glory, yet their essence remains unchanged, and continues to feed the soul of these people." This collection promises to reveal to us the essence of that soul.

Although not a bilingual edition (the preferred form of a translation), there is much for subsequent publishers to emulate in this volume that even a cursory glance reveals. Each section begins with a concise historical survey of both the country and its literature, and provides brief biographies of the poets selected to represent that country. Several poems by each poet are presented, offering the reader a broader spectrum of representative works.

The first country to be featured is Estonia with its national epic, the Kalevipoeg. As with all sections, four poets are chosen to represent that country's poetic contribution. In one of the longest poems in the collection, Hasso Krull, probably the most important of Estonia's poets, combines the paganism of Estonia's past with the present-day Russian presence as if extolling the innocence that once was:

in the night I puked up the moonshine
over the potato patch

in the morning we go for a walk through the village
to see the Mari's sacred grove

under tall old trees
there is something resembling a gymnast's pole

"this is where the pots are hung," Aleksandr explains
Aleksandr: "here fear stands"

on the way back
we cross a yard

from a large loudspeaker billows
loud Russian disco music (32-3)

Finland's poetic history can be considered to have begun with the publication of the Kalevala, Finland's national epic, in 1835 "when Elias Lšnnrot collected the poems the peasants sang while playing their harp, the kantele."(56) The prose poem appears to be a quite common form. This is the form of Tomi Kontio's 'Pasturelands': "The meadows were for cattle. The light swayed on the fields and rustled. Just so the years were changing to harvest in my hands, my nails to sickles resembling the cool autumn moon, in a decayed sky, in the darkness of mouldering leaves . . ." (90) The freshness of the images and metaphors in dealing with a poem regarding the aging process is startling. The idea of harvest transforms nails into sickles and decays the sky, and it is light, rather than grain stalks, that rustles.

Prose plays much less of a role in the poetry of Latvia, which doesn't have a national epic, relying more on folk songs which are "the repository of Latvian cultural tradition" (91). Many of these folk songs, and hence the poetry, are founded upon the pagan Dievturi religion. While officially revived and recognized in 1926, it was censored by the Soviets although it remained a strong influence in the writings of Latvian exiles. Its influence can be seen in this untitled poem of Amanda Alzpuriete:

What to sacrifice to you, forest of glass and concrete?
I need your goodwill--
as then,
when I wove red bilberry and madder sprigs
into a blanket, with which I wished to cover
the wedding bed--but the blanket
remained unfinished. (102)

Here, the spirit of the forest has not expired but, rather, lives on in the new forest--that of "glass and concrete." Sacrifice is still required to appease the new gods--those of progress, of the city.

Sharing a backdrop of nature, which "has never been neutral, it has been their spiritual doppelgŠnger, their spiritual being, their conscience" (126), Lithuanian poetry still achieves the most diversity of form of any of the countries represented in this collection. Even the Objectivist/Projectivist form of Oppen and Olson is represented by Rolandas Rastauskas's poem "Erwin, the Spawn of the Wind":

The storm
makes century-old
pines
humble

but doesn't bend
the hands
of the cathedral clock (147)

So much can be read into these seven short lines--religion, progress, time--each pitted against nature and the pine trees that have learned to accommodate natural forces; to bend in humility when the winds blow, while those man-made things remain arrogant.

The country whose poetical landscape is left to be explored is Sweden. Considering that Finland has its own section, it is difficult to fathom why this section is split into Swedish and Finland-Swedish poets. Considering, as well, that one of the best-known poets from any of these countries is Tomas Tranströmer, were there not enough Swedish poets to include? The final stanza of Ann Jäderlund's "Midsummer Night" is a thing of beauty:

The fingers on the flowers stroke the night's borders
Through the stalks in the mirror cut off and dead
The meadows out there are weakened and glimmer
Under the hot light's way out of this night. (180)

Jäderlund doesn't write, she paints, poetry. The flowers in the hand before the mirror are inscribed in the reader's mind. We feel the hot light upon them.

This anthology of northern European poetry has served its purpose well. Even in its brevity, the reader is able to develop a greater appreciation of the world of poetry. The soul of the countries of northern Europe has been revealed and appreciated.

John Herbert Cunningham is a Winnipeg writer. He reviews poetry in Canada for Malahat Review, Arc, Antigonish Review, Fiddlehead and The Danforth Review, in the U.S. for Quarterly Conversations, Rain Taxi, Rattle, Big Bridge and Galatea Revisits, and in Australia for Jacket.

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