Mild Nature Poems Cultivating Defiance and Unreasonable Hope

Carolina Thorell's new poetry collection, "Vi har alla funnits" (We Have All Existed), is described as having a "dangerous and very ambitious" quality, according to reviewer Anna Hallberg. The collection, characterized by its "mild nature poems," also cultivates "childlike defiance and unreasonable hope."

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There is something dangerous and very ambitious in Carolina Thorell's lime-green poetry book, thinks Anna Hallberg.

Thorell, who is also an artist and deacon, uses poetry as a unique space to connect disparate elements of existence. The book features a dialogue between the living and the dead, the present and the future, and even spans vast geological time, as seen in a reference to a hedgehog existing for "thirty million years."

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mild nature poems that also cultivate childlike defiance and unreasonable hope.

The collection is structured into six sections, each beginning with a haiku, and opens with a metaphysical prologue. Thorell explores the concept of a "new creation story" emerging from a state of "consumed" time and language, questioning whether humanity can "start over" in our current era of "war and climate catastrophe."

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Form and fire were close to each other and memory and language soon consumed their times.

Hallberg notes that Thorell's poems address contemporary issues such as "floods, 'as usual/ in Jäderfors,'" referencing a town previously explored in her work. The reviewer finds Thorell's approach to be neither ironic nor overly sentimental, but rather a compelling exploration of the potential for creating new spaces that can feel like home, even without possession or colonization.

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as if to start over then, before language, as if to speak, where the rains fell, and the magpie drank water, from the juniper, and the rains fell, on the melting, glaciers, when they, floated by, and owned, nothing, them either, as, to mend, and be mended, a room, without a house, as if to arrive, and arrive home, where home, perhaps, broke.