The Red Place

Into the epic sweep of Lars Amund Vaage’s long poem The Red Place come many presences in many dimensions: the living, the dead and – part-mythic, part-realist, part-surreal – the ghosts of earlier selves. Mother progresses through a series of ‘red places’ until she reaches somewhere ‘Her feet would go no further.’ Father ‘stands by me / outside of me / whistling notes / that don’t exist.’ We see the poet at the piano as a child and as an adult, and the joys and poignancy of music sound powerfully throughout.  Moving tenderly between farmland and the city, great concert halls and a family going out in the evening on the tractor to find music, Vaage’s poetry is rich, simple, complex, and wise.

“… a thoughtful collection of poems whose many qualities emerge in a quiet voice …he writes the past into the present and makes the borders between past and present, the dead and the living porous …  At the same time there is an acceptance of the passage of time and the need to forget  … a profoundly serious reflection on memory, time and death.” (Marit Grøtta, NRK—Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation)

 

“The poet takes us on a journey inwards and backwards in time … the insistence on wholeness, rather than the feeling of separation and rupture so often found in modernism, means that we come to read the poems about remembering not only in terms of painful loss, but as an inscription of the past into the present. … Read ‘There is a young man inside me’, ‘How was it with father and the horse’ and ‘Father created the landscape’. These three poems will most likely go straight into the anthologies.” (Henning Howlid Wærp, Aftenposten)

 

“Vaage … is probably better known as a fine writer of novels, but is perhaps at his best as a poet – as here. The distinction is not so great, for Vaage is also a poet when he writes prose. The themes are the passing of time, parents who age and die, love that grows into something more ordinary, and youth which disappears – but can be rediscovered … These are, in part, sublime sequences – coming together to make up one great poem – about the existential conditions of our lives.” (Eirik Lodén, Stavanger Aftenblad)