If Rolf Jacobsen (1907-1994) had come from some larger country than Norway, his poetry would be reprinted everywhere. As it is, he is better known in Europe than in North America. Born in 1907, two years after Norway and Sweden separated amicably, by this timing we are reminded how arbitrarily we privilege nationalism and identity in our organizing schemes.Jacobsen's writing possesses warmth but is never sentimental, it has pathos without bathos, and his strong feeling for nature includes a generosity towards humans in the landscape. Interestingly, this trait is often represented by the things that humans build. Exploratory poems about light poles, telescopes, and sewing machines hint at a questioning and good humored temperament (Where Do The Streets Go ? and Are They waiting For a Star?). In The Buses Long to go Home, Jacobsen likens the maneuvers of the buses to the behavior of the hippopotamus.
A modernist master, Jacobsen's later poetry was more skeptical in tone, as he observed a growing preoccupation with material things.
"The moon thumbs through the book of the night.
Finds a lake on which nothing's printed.
Draws a straight line. That's all it can do.
That's enough.
A thick line. Right to you.
Look!"
- Look by Rolf Jacobsen, translated by Robert Hedin
THE ROADS HAVE COME TO AN END NOW: Selected & Last Poems of Rolf Jacobsen, translated by Robert Bly, Roger Greenwald, & Robert Hedin Port Townsend, WA, Copper Canyon Press: 2001 839.821 JAC
THE SILENCE AFTERWARDS by Rolf Jacobsen, translated by Roger Greenwald
Princeton University Press: 1985 839.821 JAC
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