Eskatos and the Stretched Necks of Stillness

with movements from usfrom the mortalto the already crossedthey who sing our songsthey who remember our livesIn 186 verses, Mats Söderlund catalogues the natural phenomena of Sweden's primeval northern woodlands. The poem leads its reader down overgrown paths, beyond the flickering of leaves and lichen, to meet "the dead": a troop of scattered fates that populate the Nordic landscape in the forms of a speaking fog, a tinkling drizzle, a faltering wind. It is this swarm of spectral destinies that the poem sets out to praise, and to mourn. Shining of rain and gnawing of sorrow, cast from metal, snow, charcoal dust, surgical nails, and ice cold waters, Söderlund's poetry is the fragile tether to a world and past that threatens to slip through our fingers, and which no generation who seeks to survive can disclaim.