Selected Poems

Selected Poems by Knut Ødegård is a long-overdue opportunity for English language readers to survey a representative selection of poems by one of the finest contemporary Norwegian poets. Described as a poet who is "intensely aware of the sacred, yet [who] visits the darkest and often the most shocking corners in his determination to sanctify those places" (Kenneth Steven, Modern Poetry in Translation), Ødegård draws on both the illuminating short lyric and the significantly longer meditation or sequence (often working in parallel to the liturgy of the Catholic Church) to blur the line between personal anecdote and visionary perception. At once naturalistic and experimental, solemn and moving, and, by turns, hilarious and off-beat, Ødegård's poems manage both to charm and chill in their honesty and simplicity. In the words of VårtLand (Oslo's daily newspaper), "Norway does not have a court poet. But Norway does have a poet of European stature, in Knut Ødegård." Here indeed is poetry "that deserves all the superlatives in the critic's vocabulary".