Ever-present Sensuality

By Anne Lise Marstrand-Jørgensen
Jóanes Nielsen has observed that he ‘has studied on the seas around Greenland and Newfoundland and knows a little about cement mixers and JCB’s.’ And the element that makes up the core of these unsentimental and at the same time deeply felt poems is indeed nature and the normal, harsh life that each day brings.

As in his novel Glansbilledsamlerne ('The Cutout Collectors'), death is a constant presence in this collection of poems, Broer af sultne ord ('Bridges of hungry words'). The tone is set in the first poem of the collection with its complete lack of sentimentality: ‘Hjertet dunker/ Mellem bogstaverne i mit navn/ En morgen engang/ Bliver det kun de andre der vågner’ (The heart beats/ Between the letters of my name/ The morning will come/ When only the others wake up’). And it is extended through poems about the dead lobster, the dead fisherman and the dead literary heroes. The poems quiver with underplayed humour, mournful beauty, eroticism and an ever-present sensuality. Nielsen’s poems are a distillation of stone, sea and crying birds, of the smell of salt water, whale blubber and tar.

Images such as those of buoys and forests of seaweed, of rocky outcrops and the blood of birds are unmistakeable impressions of the harsh magnificence of the Faeroese landscape. There is more than pure scenery here, however, for the imagery is, as always with Jóanes Nielsen, interwoven with existential questions about life, death, love and hate, so that the language constructs its own world, which extends far beyond the local horizon. We are at one and the same time way down between the crags and way up among the stars – the world is to be found in both the heavens and in the grain of sand. In one poem the first person narrator is walking his dog. While the dog ‘explored the yellow telegrams (…) and morsed its own messages,’ he wonders whether it is he or the dog holding the lead. The picture is built up with a certain feel for humour in the concrete and tangible life of everyday reality only to switch in the next stanza and suddenly be about the ambivalent existence of God. By allowing memories, profound reflections, everyday life and unexpected juxtapositions to lie side by side on the page, Nielsen nudges the reader along with him in his ceaseless exploration of the world. There is an alluring simplicity in this tight and down-to-earth style that is complemented by a depth that makes the poems live on after the book has been closed.

In her film portrait The traces grow out of words, Karin Ottardottir follows Jóanes Nielsen in his home and its immediate surroundings. Here we meet him as the philosophical armchair poet, as the suffering humorist reminiscing in the churchyard, as the committed communist under the red flag, as the fisherman in his rubber boots and as the unsentimental, even cynical country dweller. We get the same impression of the lyrical ‘I’ in Bridges of hungry words – it is a mature voice that encompasses the complexity of human life in a way that does not leave the reader unmoved.

Translated by John Mason

Dansk version