Situating Marie Lundquist
Lundquist’s taut, image-driven, aphoristic poems speak in a contemporary voice but nonetheless offer clarity and stillness in a frenetic world. With a gimlet eye, Lundquist considers the essential mysteries of memory, childhood, love, longing, and existence.
While the emotional terrain explored is intense, devastating even, Lundquist’s tone remains at arms-length. The voice is calm but never seeks to comfort. She can be ironic but not cynical. Much of her work carries an erotic charge. Brilliantly, she appropriates scientific or pseudo-scientific language, like an anthropologist seeking to understand an alien culture.
Sweden has produced a wide range of poetic output over the centuries—from highly lyrical to stylistically innovative, from intensely emotional to overtly political—thus making sweeping generalizations somewhat fraught. Swedish poetry is often cited for its references to nature, and accurately so, given how central an appreciation of the natural world is to Swedish identity. The essential pragmatism and simplicity underlying Swedish design principles can often be found in its literary traditions as well. While Lundquist may not be widely recognized in the U.S., her work is well-regarded among those familiar with Swedish poetry. Two recent Swedish poetry anthologies have included her work along with other established masters. In 2011, Polish poet Adam Zagajewski curated the Tenth Muse reading series at Unterberg Poetry Center, a program that has showcased many high-profile poets over the years. He chose Lundquist as his first featured reader.
Extracts from I walk around gathering up my garden for the night
A winged being can suddenly fall headlong
down through space and make a deep hole in the earth’s
crust. In this way arose the disease known as scarcity.
Sit with me until I fall asleep.
Sketch motorcycle tracks in
the palm of my hand. Asphalt it.
You sit bent over your thoughts.
I button up my camisole,
let them take root.
It’s your country, this wetness.
I’m not used to being two. That another
begins right at my edge. I stretch my hand
across the border. Where I end, you
begin. In that way we are like
each other.
We sit at the kitchen table and eat our
meatballs. You don’t understand why I
am drawn to your body. I just want to stick
my hands in. Everywhere. The letters fall in
through the mail slot. Just as it should be.
So promising and practical.
There is absolutely nothing about you that brings
to mind a railway worker standing there on the tracks,
bronzed and straddle-legged and grinning his dazzling
smile at me through the train window. Absolutely
nothing. Except possibly, that provocative little gesture
with which he stuffs his shirt into his pants,
turns around and leaves.
Spare me these apostles of
ambiguity. These houses of cards that
neither stand nor fall. Give me a man
built of brick and I will hang
from his neck. Proud as a balcony.
From now on, I am undressed.
Vestigial. We can start over.
Take swimming lessons. Wait for the fall of man.
Unconditional. One of the most beautiful
words I know. Stone axe. One of the
most competent.
He rolls out his lizard tongue and licks her
all over. To be bedded or to sink can be one and
the same. Wadding or water. To be swathed by
someone who knows how it’s done. And despite that, to
be part of a generation that knows what pleasure is.
What’s left over after he’s gone is a little
slime and white water. As if someone crushed
a raw egg. Before it matured. She makes the bed
with clean white sheets. Lies down and
broods over the newborn chick that will totter
out from the shards.
If something is sticking up out of the sand, it’s either
a buried Viking ship or a man by the name of
Gulliver. An archaeologist can unearth the former with
a teaspoon. It takes a long time, years maybe. A woman
can do the same with her storybook hero. It doesn’t go
any faster.
A sandwich consists of bread, butter and cheese.
A man consists of meat, blood and water.
When a man sits next to a woman and
takes a bite of his sandwich, he can feel stupid.
The woman cries. She’s not hungry. That
is the entire difference between the male and
the female. To know whether to eat a sandwich
or not.
Female hunters rip and tear into their catch.
Male trappers see the chase like just one of many
art forms. They rehearse for a long time
on different test subjects before they stalk the real
target. It’s good for their self-esteem.
As practice, for example, a good radio
listener is an excellent choice. She isn’t used to
getting roses. Romance can kill a radio listener.
She doesn’t recognize the signs. Can’t protect
herself. The only thing she has to draw on
is Morse code which is sometimes broadcast over
shortwave radio with the notation: “To be used
only in case of emergency.”
A grown man gently lays a woman down
in the grass. Like when a child returns
a beetle back to where it belongs.
My confessor never shows his true face.
He receives all the sins, unravels them and
knits them into a bulletproof vest.
Mini-interview with Translator Kristina Andersson Bicher
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer and translator (or continues to)?
KAB: I suppose when I first read Rilke, college years. It was a thunderstruck moment where his poems just entered my bloodstream (as he says). The experience was very visceral, beyond words, though the words themselves had a taste and a smell. I guess then I felt the force of what poems can do.
HFR: What are you reading?
KAB: The Bees Make Money in the Lion by Lo Kwa Mei-en, String by Matthew Thorburn, A Sand Book by Ariana Reines. And Moby-Dick because I’m taking a class on Moby-Dick!
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted the translation of I walk around gathering up my garden for the night?
KAB: Happenstance. The best things come to us when we’re not looking. Or rather looking (because I am always looking) but not seeking. I stumbled upon an anthology of Swedish poets in a book store a few years back and when I got to Marie Lundquist’s poems, I was immediately: enchanted, mesmerized, smitten, greedy for more! And the rest followed.
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
KAB: I’m halfway through translating For Qualia by Swedish poet Hanna Riisager—a book that wonders about the unique way each person senses and experiences the world and themselves … with a nod to the cosmetics industry, Simone Weil, and more. Plus my own second full-length collection of poems is looking for a home and I’m always trying to write more/better/deeper/differently.
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
KAB: I read this somewhere and maybe it’s misattributed but someone asked the Hindu sage Sri Raman Maharshi the question “How are we to treat others?” And his response was “There are no others.” I just love this. I think about it constantly as I take subways in New York and walk the sidewalks and experience all sorts of people. We need to see ourselves in each other’s faces.
Marie Lundquist, born in 1950 and residing in Stockholm, is a poet, translator, and dramatist. She is the author of eleven books of poetry, prose, and essays; she has written two radio plays and translated several plays for the largest Swedish theaters. She also writes essays and critiques of photography exhibitions. In addition to writing and translating, she has worked for many years as a librarian and a teacher of creative writing. Lundquist received numerous awards and honors, including Sveriges Radios Lyrikpris (2002), stipendium from the Svenska Akademien (2007), De Nios Lyrikpris (2008) and the Aspenströmpriset (2015). Her books have been translated into Dutch, French, Arabic, Latvian, Polish, Norwegian, and Persian. Individual works published in journals or anthologies have been translated into Norwegian, Danish, Polish, English, German, Spanish, Russian, Estonian, Lithuanian, Greek, Italian, and Chinese. Jag går runt och samlar in min trädgård för natten was also translated into Dutch in 2001 and distributed in Holland and Belgium. In 2017, a major Norwegian press published a translation of selected poems from her first three books. The influential Norwegian paper, Morgonbladet, published an in-depth and favorable review of this new translation.
Kristina Andersson Bicher is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her work has been published in AGNI, The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Brooklyn Rail, Hayden’s Ferry, Plume, Narrative, and others. She is author of the poetry collection She-Giant in the Land of Here-We-Go-Again (MadHat Press 2020), as well as a translation of Swedish poet Marie Lundquist’s I walk around gathering up my garden for the night (The Bitter Oleander Press 2020). She holds a BA from Harvard University and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.
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Heavy Feather Review 