Tua Forsström is a visionary Finland-Swedish poet who has become Finland’s most celebrated contemporary poet. Her breakthrough came when she was still only 30 with her sixth collection, Snow Leopard, which brought her international recognition, with its English translation by David McDuff winning a Poetry Book Society Translation Award.

In the 1930s, Bo Carpelan found mention of his great-uncle Axel in a biography of the composer Jean Sibelius. This friendship is the genesis of Carpelan’s fictional diary of Axel’s dual obsession with music and with a man who, unlike him, had enough confidence in his creativity to compose his own.

Much of the literature of Finland is written not in Finnish but in Swedish, for Finland was a province of Sweden until the 19th century, and Swedish was its official language. Even after Finland passed into Russian hands in 1808, Finland-Swedes continued to dominate the country’s economic and public life, and while their poetry became a potent force for the assertion of Finland’s national identity, Swedish gradually gave way to Finnish as the dominant language of the national literature. Against this background it is easy to see how isolation became a central theme in Finland-Swedish poetry. Finnish writers are said to be obsessed by loneliness and melancholy, and to fill their books with descriptions of night and winter, frozen lakes and pine forests. Yet while Finland-Swedish poets pack quite enough snow and ice into their lines, their work is full of vitality, surprisingly different and sharply aware of the rest of European literature.

First published in 1984, this is a translation of the Samlade Dikter published by Wahlström & Widstrand in Helsingfors in 1949 and edited by Gunnar Tideström. It was the first complete English version of that volume, and the first major collection of the poet’s work to appear in England. It also contains an account of Edith Södergran’s life.