Vegas fard: Osammanhangande poetisk berattelse om ett forlopp.

Schoolfield, George C.

Lars Hulden. Helsinki. Schildt. 1997. 80 pages. ISBN 95150-0861-1.

The forlopp (course of events, process) evoked in the subtitle to Vegas fard (Vega's Journey) is very likely aging - which, since the poet is Lars Hulden, is treated with smiling irony. In "Concerning the Charms of Age," a simple and sly de senectute, the speaker no longer has a fit of dizziness after a blood test: "I'm wont to keep the bandaid on / quite long so that my wife / will notice it / and say something empathetic." In "Morning Song" the day's blooming is likened to "the rose / you're supposed to hold in your hand when dead," and a certain "Sjoberg" is adduced "who pulls on white gloves / and puts on his high hat" - a remembrance of Birger Sjoberg, the poet-composer of "Bleka dodens minut" (Pale Death's Moment). The final adventure can be contemplated, wittily if grimly, in the penultimate "Hymn of Departure": "Imagine that my turn has come! / I've been invited on a trip / I'll get to travel to the land of silence. / Neither passport nor visa is needed." A historical figure spooking in the foreground of Vegas fard is N. A. E. Nordenskiold, the commander of the expedition to find the Northeast Passage: his "doughty vessel," caught in the ice on 27 September 1878, got loose almost a year later: "On July 17 the channel opened," and the triumphant Vega sailed on toward the Bering Strait and the Pacific. But the subtext means that the voyage of life will end in the high North, like the frozen wrecks the confident Nordenskiold spies: "Surely, such can never befall us?" It will.

The poems from the New World, about the fates of emigrants (which have long fascinated Hulden, the Ostrobothnian and friend of America), about Wisconsin ("One of the highest buildings in the state capital Madison has been built by dead rats," a joke subsequently explained), may date from an earlier time in Hulden's career; on the other hand, Vegas fard contains a good many jeremiads on contemporary, phenomena: the parable on "The New Time," the portrait-poem on "The Head Hunter" ("quite a new calling / in the modern sense"), "The Game" ("I want to be a loser"), "Finland on a Bad Day" ("A motor / with five million cylinders / of which a million have stopped functioning"), and "To Finland at Eighty" (a scary laundry list of catastrophes, ending in total annihilation). "The Paradox" makes a sharp literary-critical point, and the superparadoxical target, Gosta Agren, does not need to be named. These objurgations are followed by the kindlier cycle "Homeland," opening with scales performed by a baritone owl and reaching a burlesque climax with a snowmobile racketing northward across the fields: "It must have been the winter / which fled over the last / strips of snow or who / sent his orderly / to the North Pole for help." The "Exercise on Hawthorne" recalls Hulden's great syntactical/grammatical poems of yore. Surely, Hulden is not the confused oldster of the concluding "Dialogue at an Airport" - anything but.

The Swedish-Finland Society has added to its good works by bringing out a mixture of Hulden's verse and prose, some printed before, but not always in places easily accessible, and some indeed presented only orally. The book is a tribute not just to Hulden but to his late friend, P. A. Sjogren, of the Society, at whose suggestion the project was undertaken. Of the ten sections, I would especially recommend the essay, based on a couple of speeches from 1995-96, "To Be an Author in a Minority Tongue," in which Hulden finds a tone - factual, slightly anxious, playfully self-referential - that could remind some of us of Hubert Butler, the great Anglo-Irish commentator on the fate of his dwindling minority in the ever more monolithic Republic of Ireland. A poetic contribution along the same line is "Answers to Four Questions About Swedishness." For admirers of the lyricist Hulden, there are the already familiar "Hymns" and "Songs from a Requiem" and - not well known or not known at all - the "Seasonal Poems," of which a number were published in Hufvudstadsbladet, in the summers of 1978-80, with illustrations. The crowning piece, frivolous and splendid, is "New Venerid," based on the famous and much-debated cycle of baroque sonnets by the mysterious "Skogekar Bergbo" - here a "wreath of sonnets," in which the last line of each sonnet becomes the first line in the next, while a fifteenth sonnet reprises the first lines of the previous fourteen in succession. Hulden is not only the master of elegantly parodistic verse, an underappreciated subgenre, but also the master of what used to be called the poetic handwork.

George C. Schoolfield Yale University