A Different Practice

by Fredrik Nyberg, Jennifer Hayashida (Translator)

Poetry. Translated from the Swedish by Jennifer Hayashida. "I try to not keep them entirely still/ just get them (the words) to crowd around something/ special (a theme) an idea that has such/ weight that it/ at least partially/ can replace a person's (your) glance/ when it turns away (and from me)"--from the text. A DIFFERENT PRACTICE is Jennifer Hayashida's translation of Swedish poet Fredrik Nyberg's influential book En annorlunda praktik, containing the five original sections "Rotor blades, movements 1-5," "Pets--the private," "You...," "Shall these hands," and "The Years." Showing the influences of Ashbery, Roubaud, and Susan Howe, Nyberg's quiet but forceful poems contend with the difficulties of using poetry as a form of remembrance. Through the transcription of memory, the collection creates its own fluid, mysterious, and startlingly intimate sense of time. Fredrik Nyberg, born in 1968, currently living in Gothenburg, Sweden, attended the creative writing program at the University of Gothenburg, an institution which has fostered some of the country's better-known writers, and has since become an established force in new forms of poetic expression there.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, sew-bound

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did a review of this book for Sink Review.

http://www.sinkreview.org/lab-notes/a...

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

"becoming memory of this memory"

Slim, sharp poems functioning with few woods broken and extended over pages

"certain seasons never cease"

the long cycles, particularly the 13 poems in "the years" work very interestingly together.

Of note is Ugly Duckling Presse's treatment of the text, with the original Swedish on the left pages and the English translation on the right pages. Nice to see the words cast in their original form, strange and seemingly musical, giving weight to the bright white pages.

[Forrest Gander · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poems have a quiet, diaristic quality punctuated by aporias (that remind me, at times, of Jacques Roubaud's work). Even in their plumbing of of domestic contexts, they are concerned with poetics. The poetics of a life indistinguishable from... Very lovely.