Blindstamped Silence is a Soldier’s Market

A day when I receive a package from Norway is a good day.

Yesterday, I received a copy of a new book by Norwegian poet Monica Aasprong, Soldatmarkedet. It’s a beautiful book that smells like a graphic novel. Strangely, this book is not Aasprong’s only Soldatmarkedet; she also is the author of the chapbook “Soldatmarkedet,” which I’ve reviewed previously.

Monica Aasprong, Soldatmarkedet, Cover (2006)
The covers of the book are the most beautiful parts of the book, because they are blindstamped. Each cover is swathed with an individual concrete poem in the extremist style Aasprong is famous for. Choosing just a single letter for each poem, she types a landscape line by line. Looking at these poems, we can imagine lakes and streams running through forests or fields. But since these are blindstamped, we can feel these features more than we can see them.


Monica Aasprong, “rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr,” Soldatmarkedet (2006)
Note that I’ve played with the image of the cover above to bring out the blindstamping. This modification, however, ruins the subtle beauty of this cover, so do not hold that image against the book. In their usual printed format, these poems are clear and hard-edged minimalist pieces, which enchant us by their mimesis of nature. Yet our imaginations are allowed to run free and imagine these r’s as a representing cracks in a rock or dead ground within a field of cultivated grain. The referent isn’t clear, so we read them as we read clouds.


Monica Aasprong, Soldatmarkedet, page 33 (2006)
Most of the book is made up of simple short lines of poetry in Norwegian. I cannot understand the Norwegian, but I can feel the movement of language here: chopped into pieces, it moves forward in bursts, clipped and quiet. Occasionally, two columns of text appear on the page, but usually just one. Usually, the poem appears only on recto pages, but sometimes a verso page holds a line of words for us.

I don’t know why. The meaning of the words lies outside my grasp. But I yearn to know.

_____

Aasprong, Monica. Soldatmarkedet. N. W. Damm & Son: Oslo, 2006.

ecr. l’inf.