Toto Hølmebakk, who is usually a senior physician and specialist in general surgery, makes his debut at the age of 62 with the poetry collection “Almakolender”. In the book he sticks to some poetic forms, but he does not hesitate. This flexibility, as well as Hølmebakk’s sure, clear and sensually striking language, make his debut successful. Large width “Almakolender” has, so to speak, no action. The poems operate with “I”, “you” and “we”, but you don’t know who these positions belong to. In between, they tell a story about a concrete person in a concrete place: A woman loses her glove on the train, a surgeon becomes obsessed with music. But most often the poems are placeless and contemplative. They require presence and concentration, but they are not difficult. The language is sharp and the situations so surprising that one should read the poem again simply to catch everything that happens in it. The great variety in the collection is one of the things I like best about it. Some poems are long and narrative, others are short and sensual. Some mysterious, others immediate. Hølmebakk shows that you can be shape-conscious without being limited by shape. The architect and the botanist The title is made up of three words: almanac, consonants and calendar, which are also the names of the book’s three parts. The set-up of the party is linked to the title – “Calendar” consists of 12 poems, but Hølmebakk also creates his own systems within the individual party or poem. For example, “Consonants” is circular in that it begins and ends with poems titled “BCH”. All the poems in that lot have titles based on the names of classical composers (“BCH” points to Bach and “MZRT” to Mozart), and you can imagine that they don’t have vocals because their pieces usually don’t either. In the Almanac section, the lesser-known verse form kenette is explored. A kenette consists of 16 adjective-noun pairs and an inserted poem distributed in a way that is a little too technical to reproduce here (see image instead). This part is strong. The repetitiveness has a suggestive effect (too rhythmic not to be read aloud!), and the loosely connected pairs create vague, suggestive meaning connections. There is something spontaneous and genuinely exploratory about this. Hølmebakk does not undertake to create a complete system. He allows forms to arise, but also to cease – as they do in a dance performance. This flexibility is preferable to complete perfection, if you ask me. Surprising tone Despite forms and systems, it gets sprawling space. In one of the poems some kind of being has appeared on the beach, in another a white wall suddenly stands on the other side of the lake. The tone is consistently open and wondering, and that’s gratifying. Hølmebakk allows the reader to stand in wonder without being directly cryptic. Some of his poems need more unpacking than others, but if the poem has a cultural reference you don’t immediately pick up, like “L’Origine du monde”, then you just have to resort to the search engines. Maybe you learn something new or open up an unknown world, and that’s not so bad after all. The last part of the book, the calendar, has short poems of a maximum of three lines. They are mysterious images that you can read over and over again and marvel at. Here, the language is right up there. Nature not interesting in itself Hølmebakk has a number of nature descriptions and comparisons. Unlike much other poetry, Hølmebakk’s nature comparisons are characterized by more levels than the aesthetic. Example: To stand in front of creation, as in the poem above, and marvel without being dismayed by not knowing what controls it all, is one of the most important things a human being can learn. The moor and the poem live The poems in this book are connected through both form and theme, without it being possible or appropriate to draw a perfect connection. As nature strives towards the perfect, and as we strive towards the ideal, but can never quite reach it. Hølmebakk generally sticks to the unsettled. He does not engage in confusion, but almost anti-conclusion and anti-“message”. It is refreshingly non-committal and genuinely experimental – not directly experimental, there are better examples of that. The non-binding nature of Hølmebakk can be thought to say something about the world. The bottom line seems to be: No matter how hard you try to catch the ant, it will crawl, because it is alive. news reviewer Illustration: Trond Torstensen Title: “Almakolender” Author: Toto Hølmebakk Publisher: Tiden Genre: Lyric Number of pages: 93 Date: October 2022
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