I should not have been surprised that Carl Frode Tiller is so communicative in his very first collection of poems. But the man has perfected himself in portraying ailing communication between people. Now he takes a gamble and rambles on with a roar of a long poem. He wants to be heard! Doomsday It has often been dark in Tiller’s universe. Claustrophobic. He has been close to his family and close to the contemporary world. Now he sees the whole world in an enormous sweep; the poet-I describes the beginning of the world and the course of history in a meandering, burlesque concoction of eras and geography. The one who shouts has taken the role of the wolf. He can see past and future, he sees our world end and a new one arise. Voluspå anno 2022 I cannot read this differently than that Carl Frode Tiller resorts to the most powerful aids, such as our ancient literary heritage, when he calls out caution. Beware! Animals die, relatives die, what memory remains after humans, when we too have died out? Like the fortune teller in The Elder Edda, the village bohemian imagines ragnarrok, before he drunkenly drives the forest and the car home to the village and around the foreign land. After us comes the foreign country. Someone must live there. But how? Tiller writes himself against Voluspå, he even uses sentences from the old god poem, which you know enough or what, a refrain that the wolf repeats to Odin, who has asked her to tell him about the past. When have we heard enough to act? Boundless But don’t come here and think that Tiller’s poem has something old-fashioned heavy about it. It is our time and our cultural references surround the village’s bohemians. So we have an egg here. He is the one who sees and tells. But you and dykk are also included in the long poem, the pronouns have changing references and the reader must be alert to keep up with all the details between people, places and, not least, eras. Sumer and Tony Soprano are mentioned in one and the same sentence, then and now become one: with ring-heavy fingers they snap slap slap whips over slave backs and in come delicious dishes they have picked up from roaring celebrity chefs on television. It’s confusing, it’s tough and it works. Authorship is growing Carl Frode Tiller started high and has remained at the top. The P2 listeners gave him news’s own novel prize for his debut book “Skråninga”, for which he later received Tarjei Vesaas’ debutant prize. For the novel “Innsirkling” he received both the Brage Prize and a nomination for the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize. In recent years, he has also been successful as a playwright. And now poems. And what an ambition he sets out with this collection of poems! Tiller goes even further than Øyvind Rimbereid did, when in “Solaris korrigert” he described a robotized universe four hundred years in the future, in an everyday life characterized by ecological and economic disasters. With Tiller, the very existence of the world is at stake. There are not a few authors who have announced that it is urgent to live sustainably, whether it is through factual figures and forecasts, as with Anja Røyne, or with educational and exciting insistence, as with Maja Lunde. Tiller also raises his voice, he reminds us of violence and injustice committed throughout history. It is deeply disturbing and at the same time cheekily laughable. But also, under the darkness, a gentle thanks for the wonder of people discovering art and community. The collection of poems has no dark ending. If our world is ending, the fortuneteller envisions a new beginning: Voluspå has withstood the test of time for a thousand years. How long Tiller’s words will stand, no one knows. I predict it will be a long time. news reviewer Illustration: Anna Griffin / Aschehoug forlag Title: Det framande landet Author: Carl Frode Tiller Genre: Long poem Publisher: Aschehoug Number of pages: 68 Date: September 2022 WATCH ON news TV: Program leader Pia Rivelsrud in the “Book Expedition” goes to Namsos and meets author Carl Frode Tiller. Posted on September 5, 2019.
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“The foreign country” by Carl Frode Tiller – news Culture and entertainment
