New Swedish Books, autumn 2020 1
35 Autumn 2020 A Sky of Witnesses Ingrid Elam’s c
hoice Why do we read? One answer is that literature lets us experience other times and other people. Kjell Espmark’s poetry offers us such moments. In A Sky of Witnesses a constantly changing ‘I’ speaks; sometimes easy to identify, sometimes an anonymous shadow in a recognisable landscape. Farinata calls out from Dante’s Inferno and Hillevi is on her way to Föllinge in Kerstin Ekman’s The Wolfskin Trilogy, whilst a Chinese person, executed during ‘The Great Leap Forward’, dies an anonymous death. There is a timeline, from the painter in the Stone Age cave to the refugee reaching the coast of Lesbos. It is about that which is permanent in human nature, the vulnerability, the suffering, but also the ongoing possibility of the human being. It is great poetry and published just in time for the poet’s 90th birthday. A gift to the reader. Kjell Espmark Selected works Mordet på Benjamin 1956 Voltaires resa 2000 Rosenkrantz mot Guildenstern 2020 Selected awards Bellmanpriset 1985 De Nios Stora Pris 2000 Tranströmerpriset 2010 Poetry, 330 p. Publisher Norstedts Kjell Espmark Rights Norstedts Håkan Bravinger hakan.bravinger@norstedts.se Photo: Cato Lein