Night Talks

Book excerpt: Translated by Rika Lesser. Written after the tragic and unexpected loss of her young husband, this spare and startling collection by celebrated Swedish poet and novelist Elisabeth Rynell offers a raw elegy in which everything lived--a visit with a therapist, a memory of lovemaking, a venture into the wilderness--becomes an expression of grief. Unflinching in their refusal of irony, these poems are elegantly rendered in Rika Lesser's translation, which is the first appearance of Rynell's verse in English. "Rika Lesser's fine translation recreates the demanding original with sympathetic resonance and perfect pitch." --Richard Howard "Elisabeth Rynell's Night Talks--which can be read as either one long poem or a cycle of shorter poems--spirals around a woman who experiences the abrupt death of a husband still young. With its concise, intense lines, spare but far from simple, Night Talks oscillates between stark grief and memories of lush sensuality. American poet Rika Lesser brings Rynell's requiem into English with unerring sensitivity. . . . In Rika Lesser's skilled hands, Elisabeth Rynell is revealed as a poet of startling depth coupled with a firm and unpretentious humanness." --Susanna Nied " Elisabeth Rynell's Night Talks, translated from the Swedish by Rika Lesser, is an essential work for the twenty-first century. In poems naked as flames, the book confronts a death and its sequel: 'out of this despair / grows a force / more than human. . . .' Night Talks is visceral, broken, adamant; Lesser's translation is seamless."--D. Nurkse Poetry. Women's Studies.