Anna Hallberg

Sometimes, we are faced with a work of art that fills our senses and demands all our attention. And even though we have no idea what it is we’re looking at –  because we’ve never seen anything like it before – we just have to be patient. What is this?

Anna Hallberg’s poetry collection AN is not only about such an experience,  it also offers the reader that self-same experience. What is this?

Something that neither the reader nor the lyric “I” can stop looking at is a cube of water. It rises among the sand dunes, in the middle of a vast desert. The cube vibrates, rattles, purrs, shines and sparkles. It is completely alien in the emptiness of the sand that surrounds it. Hallberg’s lyric “I” takes in the cube with the most open of minds, in what verges on an cross-draft of synaesthesia: “the colour is felt / the form is heard / I listen with my mouth / the hands know”. 

It all starts as an almost meditative observation, but towards the end of the collection it is not entirely obvious what is the cube and what is the body of the lyric “I” – and at the same time the cube continues to be distant. And so Hallberg’s impossible water cube also puts the reader in a state of alertness.  She shares this with the lyric “I”: “I try to listen carefully / to watch / respond or / react / as honestly and correctly as I can”. Gradually, emotions emerge – the bottomless sorrow, the joy of life, the frustration. 

Hallberg’s beautiful book, ingeniously and minimalistically designed as a simple square, can be read as a book about what art is, but also as a story about life itself. It is also possible to read it as a story about a planet headed for extremes. Here, there is only the water, the sand, the body of the lyric “I”, and all the emotions. The wind blows over the desert sand.  And the cube is a mystery – it refuses to be “opened / held, carried, packed away”. We can’t get to it, but we can’t let it out of our sight.

Throughout her writing, Hallberg has demonstrated her ability to make language completely her own and how she can always keep two seemingly opposite impulses working at the same time. She is not afraid to approach the banal, formulaic, and simplistic in her expression, while thematically holding onto the complex and contradictory, and conveying her wonder at all the possibilities of language. This is also the case here, where the reader gets to enjoy her playful use of language: “whisper mother-of-pearl so that the phrase exists”; “little stream / water jumps in curves and bends / eager energy how you rush forwards / skipping in amorous giggles / I am happy to see you”.  

Here, there is also a representation of how everything stands in relation to something else and what happens in the encounter itself. The rhythm of the poems and the restrained form of the collection – which in itself corresponds to the cube of water in the desert – meet the formless infinity of existence. The minimalistic form and its calm breathing are also opposed to the boundless emptiness of the desert, and the freedom and joy of play meet the bottomless sorrow: “all is left, shall be left”; “I want to cry over everything that has been / that is”. 

Hallberg is quite simply both a sensitive poet with a wide-open mind and a wordsmith with impressive control over her work. It is no coincidence that literary history is let in and allowed to unfold: for example, the kinship with the theme of Inger Christensen’s Alphabet is seen in the short phrase “apricot wind”.

Anna Hallberg was born in 1975 and made her debut in 2001 with the poetry collection Friktion. She has won several prizes and been nominated for even more. This is her tenth poetry collection, and it is the third time she has been nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize having previously been nominated for the poetry collections Colosseum Kolosseum (2010), and På era platser (2004). In addition to her lyrical writing, for many years she has been an influential and respected literary critic and lyric debater among the Swedish public. 

With her courageously self-willed and sentimental poetry collection AN, Anna Hallberg consolidates her position as one of the most important voices in Swedish contemporary poetry, while at the same time testing and shifting the boundaries of her own poetry.