I’d never beard of Eeva-Liisa Manner before I picked up this book, and it is, in fact, her first full collection of poetry to appear in English translation. She was a Finnish poet, born in 1921 and dying in 1995, and had a long career as a poet, playwright and translator, among other things. Herbert Lomas has translated the poems which are selected from a number of her books.

     In a statement about poetry included in the book, Manner says some interesting things on the subject of the reaction of Modernism against Romanticism: “For quite a while, poetry had been considered too much a matter of feeling though it should involve more than that, the whole personality. Romanticism did a great deal of damage to poetry, and particularly to its reputation; and purging poetry is of course the job of the poets themselves.” And, in a more specific comment, she recalled how one of her poems had, as its first line, ‘There’s a broad river; but I removed ‘broad’ and behold, the river became broader. Precision doesn’t like adjectives.” That final sentence is something to be preserved and brought to the attention of poets.

     But what of the poems? Reading the translations without considering Manner’s theories of poetry, I was struck by their frequent obliqueness:

How the houses have spread in this city,
things have caved in, the water’s blackened,
soon the streets’ll be awash,
the railings are rusted, the water table’s rising,
the cellars are slopping, fear’s rising
screened by strangling discretion, flagrant crime.
We’ll be needing boats - listen to the swell?
Take to the boats, forget your hats -
or if you plunge bravely in
carry the word to the other side of the distress lights.

     The meaning is suggested rather than stated, and it’s possible to extract more than one idea from what is said. What I like is the way in which the poem nudges at the reader’s sensibilities and leaves its marks on the mind. You don’t have to know exactly what the poet is talking about to get something from the poem in terms of possibilities. And if you want something of a guide to what the poet is doing then consider these lines from another poem:

The market squares, the speeding cars, the trees, the dusty green
take their style from me:
the world’s the poetic work of my senses
and stops when I die.