The Roads Have Come to an End Now

Norway's Rolf Jacobsen is one of Europe's most acclaimed writers yet, as Robert Bly points out in his introduction: "This magnificent poet is so little known in the United States." This bilingual edition, which selects the best work from Jacobsen's ten volumes, will help remedy that situation. Three dedicated translators contribute to this book. Robert Bly's translations celebrate the radiance with which Jacobsen praised the complex beauty of the Earth; Robert Hedin focuses on the countryside, creature, and star poems; and Roger Greenwald draws difficult emotions from Jacobsen's charged last poems, composed while his wife struggled with fatal illness—as when he remembers their bitter-cold wedding day during World War II: Road to the church was blocked with barbed wire. I remember we clambered over the rail fence of the parsonage. —Hey, your dress is caught —no, not there—over there. We tramped the furrows of an ice-crusted