Ann Jäderlund. LONESPEECH. Translated by Johannes Göransson. Nightboat Books, 2024. 96 pages.

The sparse, brief, poems in Ann Jäderlund’s translated collection LONESPEECH communicate through line, twisted syntax, odd prepositions, pronouns, a constellation of elemental and bodily imagery, and an undercurrent of strangeness and catastrophe. In the opening poem Jäderlund writes:

The sun dies

open the window

and do fly

if you want to

fly (3)

In the poem’s first line, the sun perishes—strange and catastrophic—and an opposing reaction, “fly,” is suggested to a “you.” The short poem’s linework complicates meaning: is the window opened in order to see the sun die or to serve as a platform for flight? Either or both readings are possible. We must also contend with the oddness of the imperative “do” before “fly.” Is the “you” being encouraged to “fly”? Or is the speaker hoping not to be abandoned in a sun-deadened world? And finally, the poem ends on a single word, “fly,” which is in discourse, perhaps, with the near rhyme of “dies” back in the first line. LONESPEECH’s poems defy certainty and immerse us in the natural-unnatural, where disaster is imminent and bodies and communication are unstable.

Before the first poem invites us to engage with the volume’s themes, we encounter two epigraphs: “probably a star still has light” (Paul Celan), and “but not tonight let us find the words” (Ingeborg Bachmann). Uncertainty (“probably”), light and dark (“still has light”), time (“not tonight”), and language (“words”) mark many of the poems in the sequence. However, only after reading Johannes Göransson’s “Translator’s Note”—at the end of the book—do we learn that Jäderlund’s text in the poems is “sampled” from the correspondence between German-language authors Celan and Bachmann. As a reader, I could not detect two separate registers in the language. Rather, the poems seem like a speech act that is solitary and intimate. It’s halting and haunting, and while someone appears to be addressed, we are not granted access to their response. The title LONESPEECH, a Celan-esque invented word, reinforces this single-sided atmosphere. Furthermore, these are poems concerned with language both written and spoken, and the limits, purposes, and failings of its ability to capture, distill, or report experience: “It burns / today can / you answer / I cannot / hear / speak” (24); “but hear / only names / names and names / none have names / but everyone knows” (39); and “many words / open the window/ are you made / of words” (51).

As this sequence plumbs the inadequacies of words to convey pain and desire, it simultaneously brims with atrocity and violence. This violence can be interpreted in the singular, Celan’s suicidal death by drowning in a river, “what the river wants / no one knows / it runs / it runs / lard” (5). Or Bachmann’s accidental death by fire, “It burns / today it is / the will I / forget” (40).  Both rivers and burning or smoke are woven throughout the text of the sequence. The violence might also refer to larger-scale atrocities. Both Göransson, the translator, and Matthew Rana, in an article in the Los Angeles Review of Books, write about what political or historical events these poems could be in reference to, such as the Holocaust, colonialism, or political extremism in contemporary Sweden. Lines and images that potentially depict such horrors become much sharper and more disturbing when those histories are considered—moments like “the kitchen is a chamber / that goes on the head / in the air you are / made of air” (10) and “We scoop the sounds / scoop and moan” (16).

At the level of word and line, Jäderlund’s poetics contain similarities in form and sense to Celan’s—combined words, strange turns, a certain darkness, and an emotional aura born from a set of words in relation. In these poems we encounter the elemental (ice, earth, light, sun), the natural (forest, river, flower), the body (eyes, hands, head), and the world of language (word, name, speak, hear). These spheres are brought together in peculiar and surprising combinations that flicker in and out of meaning. The intertextuality among the poems is complex and serves as a primer for how to interpret certain images. For example,

Forest black

all clang

forest black

black

forehead

foreclang

I want to hear (13)

The words “forest,” “clang,” “hear,” “head,” and “black” all surface elsewhere in the sequence. “Foreclang” in particular stands out in these lines as the only invented word, though it emerges from the words that precede it, “fore” in “forest” and “forehead” and “clang” from “all clang.” The poem ends with the line, “I want to hear,” where the ability to hear is possibly impeded and “want to” expresses some desire. Perhaps, this last line is in dialogue with the various “clangs” in the poem—a dissonant, harsh word, related to sound. This word shape-shifts throughout the collection, “Clang earth,” “clang worry” (22) as does the word “lard.” Both words have an old, unpleasant sound and feel, and disrupt the more pastoral language. In this poem, sight (“forest black”) and sound (“all clang,” “I want to hear”) are also disrupted.

The “Forest black” poem above intersects intertextually with this poem a dozen pages later:

Inversion

of black

Black Forest

as the forest black

gets colors

all colors

that still do not exist

and can be measured (25)

This poem places us geographically in the actual Black Forest region of Germany, while the previous poem only alluded to the Black Forest. In lieu of closely reading this poem, I want to introduce two of Jäderlund’s word combinations that encapsulate what is difficult to articulate about these poems: “clearabout” and “noneabout.” These poems refuse to be fully known and function by overtone and undertone: “clearabout” and “noneabout.” Our ability to know is neither clear nor none, but in both senses “about.” We orbit the facts of these poems, but there is much to know in those outer rings. “Clang” is hard and jarring; “forehead” morphing into “foreclang” hints at transformation or violence. The possibilities are myriad, but they all point to darkness, frustration, impeded desire, or physical pain or limits.

The process of being kept from complete knowledge, like the hindered efforts at communication in the poems, is part of the knowledge and experience the poems are creating. The “word” is elusive—everything and nothing, all at once.

Tracy Zeman's first book, Empire, won the New Measure Poetry Prize from Free Verse Editions. Her poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly and others. She lives outside Detroit, Michigan, with her husband and daughter, where she hikes and birdwatches in all seasons.