Journal
Long-form essays and meditations on poetry, language and silence – from Swedish modernism to Persian mysticism.
From Keats's last ode to Tranströmer's snow-covered island. A long essay on the poems of autumn and winter – how they teach us to let go and how to endure – from Rilke, Hardy and Shakespeare to Dickinson, Liu Zongyuan, Frost and Coleridge.
Which poems do we read when someone dies? An essay on elegies at funerals and memorial services – from Mary Elizabeth Frye and Karin Boye to Dan Andersson, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.
Psychology named the stages of grief, but poetry had already walked them all. A long essay on poems that follow sorrow from shock and rage to reconciliation – from Mary Elizabeth Frye and Dylan Thomas to Christina Rossetti, Wallace Stevens and Tennyson.
Loneliness is poetry's oldest theme. A long essay on poems about loneliness – from Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe to Rainer Maria Rilke, Anna Akhmatova, Gunnar Ekelöf and Philip Larkin.
Why do we turn to sad poems when life feels heavy? An essay on poetry as a companion in grief – from Edith Södergran and Karin Boye to Sylvia Plath, W.H. Auden and Tomas Tranströmer.
An essay on how modern poetry carries sorrow in a fragmented world – from T.S. Eliot's empty cities and Rilke's angelic cry to Paul Celan's silence after the Holocaust.
A deep dive into Swedish poetry about sorrow, longing and Nordic melancholy – from Gunnar Ekelöf's modernist darkness to Tomas Tranströmer's quiet natural landscapes.
A deep dive into the saddest quotes about longing, absence and what never returns – from Miłosz, Eliot, Hughes, Rossetti, Yeats and Frost.
A collection of the most sustaining sad quotes about grief and death from Auden, Tennyson, Dickinson, Akhmatova, Rilke, Bishop and Szymborska – for when sorrow needs to be given words.
A collection of melancholic lines from poets around the world – from Matsuo Bashō and Edna St. Vincent Millay to Giacomo Leopardi and Inger Christensen – about loneliness, transience and the fragility of being human.
A collection of the most moving lines about heartbreak from Byron, Plath, Shakespeare, Sappho, Neruda and other poets – for when love has left an emptiness only poetry can fill.
An essay on the most moving lines from Sappho, Rilke, Dickinson, Boye and Tranströmer – and why their sorrow continues to console us.
Why do so many poets write while others sleep? An essay on the role of night in poetry – from Gunnar Ekelöf and Karin Boye to Elizabeth Bishop and T.S. Eliot.
When language fails and sleep won't come, the poem becomes a kind of bandage – not a cure, but a way of holding together what has broken. An essay on heartbreak in poetry, from Sappho to Edith Södergran and Anne Carson.
A reading of Tomas Tranströmer that shows how the pauses, the breaths and the white space between the lines carry his poetry as much as the words themselves.
How a single poem about buds bursting open became a way of life for generations – and why Karin Boye's poetry keeps speaking into our own age of crisis and transformation.
Why 800-year-old Persian verses still strike us – and what happens on the way from Mevlana's Konya to the stillness of the Swedish language.
How a young woman in a Karelian sanatorium blew Swedish poetry to pieces – and built it anew. A reading of modernism's first Swedish-language breakthrough.
Beyond the myth of the self-destructive poet there is an artist of rare technical sharpness. A reading of the Ariel poems as metallurgy rather than autobiography.
Why do poets always write about autumn? A reading of three great autumn poems – Verlaine's violin lament, Stagnelius's nocturnal longing and Rilke's prayer for solitude – that shows how the season became the mirror of the soul.
One of the world's most untranslatable words is the Portuguese saudade – a longing for something that may never have existed. A reading of Fernando Pessoa, Pär Lagerkvist and Cesário Verde on how poetry has tried to name the unnameable.