Utan langtan - inget liv.

Schoolfield, George C.

Maria Wine. Stockholm. Bonniers. 1997.87 pages. 177 kr. ISBN 91-0-056500-8.

Maria Wine (b. 1912) has had a long and colorful career, both as a persistent voice in the Swedish lyric (and prose poem) and as a literary personality. Born in Copenhagen, an orphanage child, she managed, with quick intelligence and striking good looks, to attract attention early on. (For years she was one of the most photogenic dwellers on Sweden's Parnassus.) In the summer of 1936, she met the up-and-coming Artur Lundkvist at a resort, Rorvig, recently become popular because of a waltz named after it; one thing led to another, and by December the two were married. Thanks to Artur's help (and residence in Sweden), Maria shifted languages and in 1943 began her own production with Vinden ur morkret. Her poems, as they developed, were much read, because of their clarity of language and argument (a welcome relief from the difficulties posed by Sweden's fyrtitalister), their often autobiographical content, and a certain reflected fame, of course, from the great Lundkvist himself. Their travels together - for example, their visit to Agadir (Morocco) in 1960, which chanced to coincide with a terrible earthquake that extracted a lengthy prose poem (handsomely translated into English by Steven Sondrup) from Artur's ever-ready pen - could easily be tracked in the press, and their occasional marital difficulties became the stuff of some of Maria's books. The marriage held until the death of Lundkvist in 1992, after a decade of illness. In 1994 Wine published Minnena vakar (see WLT 69:3, p. 607), comprised largely of Artur's letters to her (he had not preserved hers to him) but joined together by plenty of reminiscences on Maria's part, not to mention a gallery of snapshots of her.

Maria Wine's latest collection is a brave confrontation with old age: "I myself was without longing, a dried-up river / . . . My shadow crept before me: / now it was my guide"; and "Pan has ceased playing the flute / the lightning-swift idea often dies / even as it is lighted / My hand seeks in vain / to weave itself / into another's hand." With the best will ill the world, a reader cannot shut his eyes to such obviosities as "We are imprisoned / by time's / rolling wheel," "The silence between two lovers / is a hymn of praise to love," or "The poem woos the flowers, / adorns them with beautiful words"; but the same reader must appreciate such poems as that about two stages of the bereaved and aging beauty's day: the first strophe describes a hopeless dawn ("How shall this day become a day for me?") and the twilight ("Liberated I fall down into / slumber's embrace"). The eternal child of good fortune, Wine has a consolation not often given to disappointed old folk: in her extremely open language, she says, "I am pregnant with poems and / their words." The epilogue, "Title Game," is a review, a poetic bibliography, of her lyric production.

Considering the long lives of many Scandinavian poets and their willingness to talk about themselves, it would not be a hard job to make a florilegium of poems written by the aging or aged. Cicero's observation that one of the blessings of age is the end of passion's humiliations (and an increase in the blessings of gravitas) is not altogether applicable to the North.

George C. Schoolfield Yale University