New Swedish Books. Autumn 2016 1
NEW SWEDISH BOOKS Peder Alexis Olsson POST-WAR MU
SIC OEI Editör Rights: OEI Editör Post-war Music Wars follow mankind. We experience them at close quarters, from a distance, everyone has them in their home through the media, everyone encounters the victims daily: on the street, in a shop, at a café. War is a function of politics, economics, religion; old hatred dressed up in new clothes. And because it’s political, it’s also at the centre of an agreed social system. We all live with it. Peder Alexis Olsson’s book Post-war Music is a form of audio-visual scenery in words: the statements of politicians, news reports, the poet’s own essayistic reflections, the sounds of war itself. This raging book is an expression of wanting, partly building on the legacy of earlier Swedish concrete poetry, to give form to all this – despair over the cruelty, the attacks, in which we are all simultaneously participant and victim. Wind Player Magnus Ringgren WIND PLAYER Bokförlaget Edda Rights: Bokförlaget Edda Poetry, literature: incantations and contact points that create connections – in time, between the current moment and our memory, instruments that help us see and understand both that which has been and that which now is. In his new collection Wind Player, Magnus Ringgren brings a childhood and an adolescence to life. The Gotland of the fifties and sixties is framed by memory, but this is not nostalgia or rose-tinted recollection – instead, it is there because that time, and those experiences, are also a part of life. Part of life together with the current time, with other places, with fiction and reality, everything we do and remember or create new memories of. Magnus Ringgren shows this in rich, rolling, unruly poems, as though the book were a ship with creaking boards, masts and rigging. He creates a world like that which has been and that which is. 28 Photo: David Johnsson