A Different Practice

Poetry. Translated from the Swedish by Jennifer Hayashida. "I try to not keep them entirely still/ just get them (the words) to crowd around something/ special (a theme) an idea that has such/ weight that it/ at least partially/ can replace a person's (your) glance/ when it turns away (and from me)"--from the text. A DIFFERENT PRACTICE is Jennifer Hayashida's translation of Swedish poet Fredrik Nyberg's influential book En annorlunda praktik, containing the five original sections "Rotor blades, movements 1-5," "Pets--the private," "You...," "Shall these hands," and "The Years." Showing the influences of Ashbery, Roubaud, and Susan Howe, Nyberg's quiet but forceful poems contend with the difficulties of using poetry as a form of remembrance. Through the transcription of memory, the collection creates its own fluid, mysterious, and startlingly intimate sense of time. Fredrik Nyberg, born in 1968, currently living in Gothenburg, Sweden, attended the creative writing program at the University of Gothenburg, an institution which has fostered some of the country's better-known writers, and has since become an established force in new forms of poetic expression there.