New Swedish Books, autumn 2020 1
31 Autumn 2020 The Eighth LAND Yukiko Duke’s choi
ce In 1986, 38 years old, Jila Mossaed left Iran, her country of birth. A celebrated poet in her homeland, she began a new life as an unknown refugee in Sweden. After only ten years she had mastered the Swedish language and published a celebrated poetry collection. In the six subsequent works her main theme has been exile as an existential state: that eternal, painful foreignness. This remains the case in her most recently published collection of poetry, The Eighth Land. Yet here her two irreconcilable worlds begin to approach one another: a blackbird perching on her Swedish balcony awakens the memory of a Persian nightingale in the gardens of Shiraz. Now there is also a “freedom in not belonging”. Mossaed – who in 2018 was elected to the Swedish Academy – expertly charges her seemingly simple poems with an existential force. Jila Mossaed Selected works Månen och den eviga kon 1997 Ett ljud som bara jag kan Vad jag saknades här 2018 Selected awards ABF:s stipendium 1999 Erik Lindegren-priset 2019 Karl Vennbergs pris 2019 Poetry, 68 p. Jila Mossaed Publisher Bokförlaget Lejd Rights Jila Mossaed jilamossaed@hotmail.com Photo: Eva Bergström