Håkan sandell’s poetry relate to the common poesiutgivningen much like hard rock to kritikerhyllad pop music: deliberately apart, secure in its expression, full obrydd that its särtecken – bound verse, really good starting point motif, a orfiskt diktarideal – is considered a tad cheesy.
There is something refreshing in the integrity, no matter what you think about the outcome. Sandell is committed to the traditionalist aesthetic approach that he formulated most clearly in the essay ”On the retrogardism” from 1996. A position which in brief can be described as follows: poetry is not uprooted. Thus, it should not behave that way, but instead looking backwards, toward the pre-modern poetic techniques.
and nothing” means no significant deviation from sandell’s previous production. The book consists of forty elegies, divided into four cycles of the name and the mood for the seasons: winter, spring, summer, autumn.
Why write just elegies, which are a kind of sorgedikt? What is mourned? In some poems it is about a lost love. In other – and perhaps mainly – a society, a civilisation, a bygone community. Sandell pans with impressive ease across the different scenes. He sees both the globe and the cultural space he himself belongs to go under the ”Fukuyamas neoliberal middle ages”:
the Same twilight falls over the contemporary Oslo, where many of the poems unfolds. Lyrical section with complicated metaforik (”more sweeping in their mind’s sofistik / is the than kompasspetsarnas direction, / and out of the blodmörka the maze / where it has framnystats”…) interspersed here with listings from the street environments. The poet feels equally at home in the culture, as in the gutter – a ”modern life painter”, to borrow a term from Baudelaire.
painting stopped being modern for well over a hundred years ago. The images are characterised, consequently, by a primitivism that is not aged particularly well since the world exhibition in Brussels in 1897. Sometimes becomes dekadensromantiken really painful, like a ”beautiful prostitute” sounds tampongen slide out on the sidewalk ”as imperceptibly as everything is done in the home country”, or when the characters ”zigenerskan” and ”islam’s golden indiskor” makes his entrance.
it is not said that Håkan Sandell is not good at what he does. But it does not help, for what he is doing is not good. Too rarely occurs in a fruitful tension between the klassicerande the idiom and the present that is depicted (despite the fact that this must be the idea – to write a dying present in a dying language). The craftsmanship of the workers to although it stops at a kind of lillgamla pastischer: Craftsmanship, solid as cosplay.
the only parties dealing with a separation that works invändningsfritt. Only here you can see the man behind the bardkostymen. He sits in a café with his wife and learns that she met another. And thinking:
