In Finnish

I´ve translated one of the poems from my collection, Midas Touch, into Finnish, with some help from Eevi Apponen (acknowledgement duly rendered). The poem is `Family´ from the prologue, `Two Poems From Finland´. This is what it looks like in Finnish:


Perhe

Rappu, puutarha
polku, pensas, ruohon
tuoksu sateen jälkeen,

pehmeä pip kun vettä
putoaa lehdille,

hohto autotallin
seinävalon ympärillä.

Ja tuolla
emo-janis
kahden poikasensa keskellä,

kuusi korvaa silhuettina
lampujen valaisemassa
asfaltissa.


... and this is how it sounds when read aloud by an Englishman with a poor accent. Still, non-Finnish visitors to my blog can at least get an idea of the Finnish version, I think. You can hear the same poem read in English on the video `Two Poems From Finland´ below; `Family´ is the second.

Readings of some poems from Midas Touch

I´ve uploaded two videos of me reading poems from my collection, Midas Touch. These poems are on YouTube as well. I plan to add some more poems in the future and also an excerpt from my novel, The Finn´s Tale.


Claire Clairmont and Allegra

Claire Clairmont was briefly the lover of the poet, Lord Byron and Allegra was their daughter. Allegra died at the age of five. Claire later lived with Percy Shelley and his wife, Mary Shelley. It is not known whether Claire and Percy were lovers but there is no doubt that she loved him. The shawl referred to in the poem was a gift from Percy to Claire. After Percy´s death Claire spent many years living in Russia and other countries.





Two Poems From Finland

The second video should interest blog readers in Finland as it includes the two poems from Finland that make up the prologue to Midas Touch, Winter Swans and Family.




I hope you enjoy listening to these poems. Do leave comments if you feel inclined.

Getting The Finn´s Tale into bookshops

Now that the academic year has ended and I´ve got a bit more time, I´ve been doing some marketing for The Finn´s Tale. I visited Helsinki yesterday and had meetings with the managers of three bookshops. I had already supplied copies to Tampere bookshops: Akateeminen Kirjakauppa and the two Suomalainen stores. All three of those shops have copies on their shelves as I write this. So I thought it was time to widen my market area. I´d contacted the managers of two Suomalainen Kirjakauppa stores in Helsinki to set up meetings for Tuesday and I visited the bookstore in the railway station on spec.

The managers were interested in the idea of a novel set in Finland which includes a lot of information about Finnish history, nature, art and culture, architecture and cooking in the course of telling a story. They were quite cautious about the prospects for sales, though. Of course, they know the business better than I do. I think that Finn´s who can read English quite well, of whom there are a great many, and foreign visitors to Finland who are looking for an interesting souvenir, would be likely to buy the book and that´s what I said. The conversation was positive and friendly and I felt that it was a good idea to make that personal contact, although I´m aware that I´m not much of a salesman. I felt that didn´t matter for the kind of approach I was making. The outcome was that one shop took 5 copies to try and the managers of the other two shops took just one copy each to have a closer look at before deciding whether to put copies on the shelf.

And when my business was completed I went to the wonderful Helene Schjerfbeck exhibition at Ateneum.

I returned home feeling reasonably pleased. So if you´re in Helsinki, you can buy a copy of The Finn´s Tale at the Pocket Books shop in the central railway station. And maybe from Suomalainen bookshops in Kamppi and Aleksanterinkatu later, if they decide to stock it.

And you should definitely get to the Schjerfbeck exhibition, too!





Great discount on The Finn´s Tale at Book Depository

Book Depository have just offered an extra 10% discount to their usual big discounts for your book and others, which includes free international postage. They actually must run at a loss with this so it's well worth taking advantage! People need to put in the code APMA12 http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/search/advanced?searchSortBy=popularity&searchTerm&searchAddedTerm&searchTitle&searchAuthor&searchPublisher=ward+wood&searchIsbn&searchLang&searchSubmit=Search

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Working on my new poetry collection

I spent part of the Easter weekend going through the poems I´ve written since putting together my last collection (Midas Touch, published by Ward Wood Publishing). My main objective was to do fine tuning to those poems that have had time to `settle´. I think that most poets find, as I do, that after the initial process of composition - which may take anything from a couple of days to a couple of weeks and involve only 3 or 4 drafts, or closer to 20 - after this process, it´s a good idea to leave the poem alone, forget about it, and then come back to it with fresh eyes and ears. In fact, I usually have several settling periods, followed by tinkering.

So that´s what I was doing over Easter. It also seemed like a good opportunity to take stock. How close am I to having my second collection ready? I spent some time considering each poem carefully, deciding firstly, if I felt it was up to standard and secondly, whether it fitted into the collection as a whole. It´s important to me that the poems in a collection work well together and that there is dialogue between the poems. I want a theme to be dealt with over several poems, allowing for more than one take or point of view. And I´m also very fond of having images and words that recur throughout a collection. In this new collection there are several poems in which stone and rock appear in various forms and several beach, seaside and ship poems. Some of the beach poems also contain pebbles and rocks. There´s an underlying theme of the relativity of perception.

So how many poems have I got ready? I reckon I have 33 that I would want to include in the new collection. That´s a bit over half, I should think. And that means probably about two-and-a-half years before the whole collection is ready. I don´t write very fast.

Nesting box in winter

An apostrophe of snow
tops the nesting box

Nancy Mattson: Finns and Amazons; Lines From Karelia

Two fascinting new publications about Finns and their history

I´ve just been reading two very interesting books, both published by Arrowhead Press: Finns and Amazons, a poetry collection by Nancy Mattson, and Lines From Karelia, which is actually a pamphlet containing mainly letters written by Nancy Mattson´s great-aunt from the Soviet Union before the outbreak of the Second World War. The two publications complement each other since one section of Finns and Amazons is based on, and includes excerpts from, the letters in Lines From Karelia, which in turn contains a few of the poems. Another section in Finns and Amazons is inspired by the work of women Russian painters and some of these speculate about a possible connection between the great-aunt as a child and one of the painters.

Some background is needed. Nancy Mattson is a Canadian Finn who now lives in London. Both Nancy´s grandmother, Anna, and Anna´s sister, Lisi, writer of the letters, emigrated from Finland to Canada in their youth. Anna settled in Canada, raised a family, her children had families of their own. Lisi left Canada with her husband, Eino Hirvonen, for the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. Like thousands of other Finns, they believed in the socialist utopia that was being built in the Soviet Union at that time. The letters tell a part of the story of what happened to them.

I say, `a part of the story´ because Lisi Hirvonen does not fill in all the details of her life in the Soviet Union of the 30s. Perhaps she felt it wouldn´t have been safe, or she wanted to hide the truth, or she was just not the kind of writer who supplied details. Her writing style is also rather idiosyncratic: there is no punctuation in the original Finnish versions of the letters. The translator has preserved this feature in the English versions, wisely, I think. The reader doesn´t always know where one sentence ends and the next begins. Occasionally, one has to back-track a few words. But the sentences (if there were any!) and the general use of language, is fairly simple. It´s easy to follow the sense. And the effect of having no punctuation gives a terrific sense of momentum to her narrative and brings Lisi´s personality closer to the reader.

Perhaps, for me, and I imagine for many readers, the most poignant aspect of the letters is what Lisi doesn´t say. She and Eino obviously went with high hopes and great expectations. At some point they began to feel disappointment and betrayal. Lisi never says this outright, but the tone of the letters changes over the years. Lisi´s and Eino´s marriage also broke up. Again, Lisi doesn´t go into this in the letters that have survived. Alone and nearing 40, Lisi comments in her final letter that perhaps it might have been better if she hadn´t left Canada. It´s heart-breaking. And in nearly every letter she writes to her sister: `don´t worry about me´.

The last letter is dated 1939. After that, Anna didn´t receive another letter from her sister. Nobody knows what happened to her.

There is a fascinating extension to this true life story in the poems. In the first section Nancy Mattson speculates that the painter, Sonia Delaunay, might have painted Lisi as a child. And later, that a photo of a girl in a Soviet tourist guide, in whom Mattson sees a strong family resemblance, could just possibly be Lisi´s daughter.

Compelling reading. Anyone interested in Finland, Finnish culture and history, and the dramas of life will love these two slim volumes.