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Here
is the nightmare, the dark swamp with hungry, leaking eyes, tiny bones split
open, and putrefying flesh and fur. Aase Burg's With Deer (Hos rŒdjur), translated
from the Swedish by Johannes Goransson, has thrust a vision oozing horror from
which one may at first privately recoil then come to embrace. It is bound in
a ninety-three page book of poems that looks like any other until it is
opened; then its black, musty oil, emerges and clings to the skin. There is
no 'wink-wink' of polite terror here but instead a purely gruesome and
absolutely dank spectacle that softly gnaws like decomposition must.
Berg's work invites the reader to approach an environment that is at once
recognizable yet remains outside of the direct experience of the living, like
that of a travel account into sealed, noxious catacombs where flesh and
flowers rot. At the same time,
however, in a culture where death and its untidy functions are often
insulated away, this work can act as a tonic by acknowledging the darkness'
presence, such as is admitted in, 'In the Horrifying Land of Clay': 'I was
thrilled to have him as my enemy'. While most of the poems directly describe
decay in an inescapably near proximity in the present, occasionally previous
states are referred to and offer an orientation, such as 'we are born of
sewers... marsh blood and creamy gunk blood'. And oddly birth, though emerging
through destruction, runs through these poems in a kind of paradoxical
inversion; because while in addition to bearing an intimate witness to
decomposition, it is revealed that only through the organic, the living, that
the most disgusting substances may appear as Berg illustrates by 'In the Heart
of the Guinea Pig Darkness':
She gives birth and
groans, she moans and bleeds. Everywhere
the membranes,
everywhere their bloated puff bellies. We run
with the heart in
the tunnel, you and I, while nervous systems
break down behind
us, while the amniotic fluid surges in the
pumping, pulsing
chasm. Rotting acids and guinea pig lymph
are streaming
yes streaming down the wallsÉ
In these
poems, as exactly as they might render the most appalling images, the tone
appears to do so without any hint of sadistic pleasure and is therefore saved
from an ironic distance that would otherwise degrade the project into an
experiment with excess for its own sake instead of for its implications. The
unpleasant seems to be presented in the spirit of documenting that which
lurks in life and the imagination like the two-thirds submerged portion of an
iceberg. The poems therefore expose the dim undersides on which their
opposites, such as perfumed sentiments and delicate longings, flourish and tread
with such seemingly confident assurance. Rather than a mock confidence, there
is a raw, primal power contained in With Deer, albeit, perhaps necessarily, dark,
that challenges the reader to witness without looking away. And in the end
that energy is transferred through sight to render a palpable experience of
the gruesome and perhaps to contemplate how the frequently unspoken is no
less present and influential - so similar to psychoanalysis' disconcerting
depiction of the unconscious and its motivational forces.
The result is that the excessive terror contained within these poems becomes
thrilling and by contrast, brightens that which has not yet perished through
the recognition of being able to flirt on the macabre edge without being
destroyed. It is as if fears
themselves can only be recognized through such an intense exploration of the
dark. Here in a small book that at first glance might look as polite as any
other, Berg has managed to shatter the sanitary aphorism 'from dust to dust'
and replace it with the sticky, odorous depiction of 'from muck to muck'.
With Deer
is Aase Burg's first full-length work to be published in English. She is the
author of four other books in Swedish: Mork
Materia (Dark Matter); Forsla fett (Transfer
Fat); Uppland; and a short story collection, Perversioner: 12
noveller om avvikelser. She was a founding member of
the Stockholm Surrealist Group and has edited the literary journal Bonniers Litterþra Magasin (BLM).
Johannes Goransson has
previously translated selections of Berg's poetry and is the co-editor of
Action Books and the journal Action, Yes.
© Robert
Fontella 2010
Robert Fontella is the author of a book of poetry, Lines Through (Seetalk 2010). A bi-lingual
play of his, Clown Crossing, will be performed at the 2010 Arizona Fringe Festival.
He is currently pursuing a MFA in creative writing though the University of
New Orleans.
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