Eva Kristina Olsson

Anselm Hollo once wrote to me that he though Aase Berg was the first Swedish poet "writing in the wake of Björling." I would add to that Eva Kristina Olsson, who was something of a mentor to Berg. She was also at one point friends with Ann Jäderlund (She's older than Aase, more of Jäderlund's generation) but apparently has a somewhat problematic relationship to the Swedish poetry world. While holding my daughter I've been reading Olsson's absolutely brilliant 1988 book "Brottet" (which could be translated either as "the crime" or "the breakage").

Here's a wonderfully Bjorling-like poem in my translation:

just one more time
just one more time
everything for me
and rat


And this:

I am so little
I am so little
in the large horse


With both Aase and Olsson I like the way the way they take a certain erasure-ness from Björling, but instead of the high romantic, nature mystic diction of Bjorling, they have perverse fairy tale vocabulary (and in the case of Aase, also vocabularies from sci-fi, science, B-movies etc, though these may all be considered fairy-tale-like in their own right....)