Maintenant #5 – Gerður Kristný
Icelandic weather and nature have really affected my poetry. It’s dramatic. Serious weather changes can evoke stories and as do dangerous mountain roads. We don’t have dark woods or wolfs but we’ve got freezing storms and the winter darkness envelops us four months a year. That’s when things start to happen. During the summer there’s light all of the time and no need to sleep. And again, that is something worth telling… Contemporary Icelandic poetry is rather down to earth. Last year a few poets wrote books specifically about the financial crisis, but poets that write about love and the landscape are still popular. Strangely there isn’t much love or landscape on the news nowadays and that’s when it comes to poetry. Icelandic readers are open to poetry. In schools we have to study poetry and learn poems by heart…
In the fifth of his Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Icelandic poet Gerður Kristný.
Six Poems
By day there’s not a peep
from Anne who lives
in widowhood overhead
— except when she dozes off
over her diary
drops it on the floor
Otherwise not a peep.
It’s another matter at night
then there’s all hell of a hubbub
Anne’s friends pound up the stairs
hollering their hellos
and crack open a feast
Some with a bottle of buttermilk
others nursing eggs
Towards dawn the neighbours are fed up
of fiddles and folksongs
The guests depart in haste
melting into the walls…
By Gerður Kristný.
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