To the Outermost Stars
by Stein Mehren
Translated by Agnes Scott Langeland.
Part of our Visible Poets series edited by Jean Boase-Beier
Stein Mehren, Norwegian poet and playwright, writes in the language of the heart, weaving his themes and imagery into a kind of baroque music, in poems that swell and fall like symphonies. Writing about love and desire, and the despair that often attends them, he weaves together classical love stories and intimate expressions of love in daily life to create a tapestry of the strongest human emotions.
[Stein Mehren] is one of Norwegian literature's greatest lyricists, and perhaps its finest love poet. His ground-breaking imagery and use of language are intensified by paradoxical turns of expression... The rhythmical force he creates is at times symphonic and melodious, rising towards the ecstatic, or brief, concise and penetrating... his best work earns him a place among Norway's leading poets...
Stein Mehren has been his own school of lyrical poetry within Norwegian poesy... He wrote impassioned poems with philosophical themes, poems that search for identity or that place humanity in a cosmic world picture... Novel metaphors and lucid images whirl through tales that put life in perspective...
My love poems are not solely concerned with love. I use it as a metaphor to portray loss, failure, childhood — the best love poetry is as much about life as about love...
Agnes Scott Langeland's translation of the Norwegian Stein Mehren's To the Outermost Stars is excellent... deserves buying and reading.
Hbk: 9781911469506
Pbk: 9781911469490
Published June 2019