One Evening in October I Rowed out on the Lake

Tua Forsstrom is a visionary Finland-Swedish poet who has become Finland’s most celebrated contemporary poet. Her poetry draws its sonorous and plangent music from the landscapes of Finland, seeking harmony between the troubled human heart and the threatened natural world. One Evening in October I Rowed Out on the Lake is her first new collection since her celebrated trilogy, I studied once at a wonderful faculty, published by Bloodaxe in 2006. As Sweden’s August Prize jury commented, this is poetry ‘both melancholy and impassioned’, expressing a ‘struggle against meaninglessness, disintegration, destruction - against death in life’.