Dag T. Straumsvåg, The Mountains of Kong: New & Selected Prose Poems, trans. Robert Hedin and Dag T. Straumsvåg

 

DEBTS

We owe Tomas and Elisabethdinner. We owe my grandmother a visit to her grave. We owe my brother Christmaspresents for the last two years, and Lars a solid win at bridge. We’veneglected our garden for years, not to mention Mrs. Hansen next door. We oweour cat fresh sand, $22,000 in back taxes, and the wife’s boss a beating fromlong ago. We owe the changing weather several weeks of flu. In the neighbour’s pool,the yellow rubber duck has capsized, its legs sticking straight up in the air. Weowe it a resurrection. And now, down the block, the mailman comes with a heapof new bills. We owe him so much. We’ll never be able to pay him what hedeserves.

I’veseen bits of his work, whether through journals or chapbooks (including one through above/ground press), for a while now, so it is good to see a largercollection by Norwegian poet and translator Dag T. Straumsvåg, his The Mountainsof Kong: New & Selected Prose Poems (Picton ON: Assembly Press, 2025).Translated from the original Nynorsk into English by the author himself and Minnesota-based author and translator Robert Hedin, the book also includes an introduction by Canadian poet, editor and publisher Stuart Ross, as well as a foreword by co-translator Hedin.As Hedin’s “FOREWORD” begins: “The Mountains of Kong presents sixty-oneof the rich, evocative prose poems of Norwegian poet and translator Dag T.Straumsvåg. A bilingual edition, it includes a generous selection of poems fromhis previously published volumes as well as a gathering of new poems that havenever before been translated into English and appear here for the first time.”Hedin continues:

            For those who prefer poetry to be prudent andwell-behaved, the poems of The Mountains of Kong will come as asurprise. They are not well-mannered, restrained, or fastidious in any way, nordo they follow a traditional narrative path. Instead, they are quirky,quixotic, and, above all, endlessly inventive—brief, jazz-like riffs thatthrough their deft phrasing and many unexpected turns travel a constant courseof discovery, often voyaging off the map into worlds where nothing is as itseems and “not a single landmark is where it should be.”

Itis interesting to hear Hedin’s framing of Straumsvåg’s work as being outside a “traditionalnarrative path,” as Stuart Ross’ introduction, “A NORWEGIAN POET IN NORTHAMERICA,” describes the poems assembled in this collection as having afoundation well set in North American poetry and poetics. “His sole bookpublished in Norway,” Ross writes, “back in 1999—Eg er Simen Gut (IAm Simen Gut)—was primarily a collection of nature poems, but his interests—includinghis immersion into the works of Russell Edson, Daniil Kharms, and James Tate,among others—eventually took him to wildly different poetic territories afterthat debut publication. And Dag has since been championed by a good dozen prominentpoets in the US and Canada, where he has attracted a modest but devotedfollowing.” Ross then offers a list of further North American poets that Straumsvåghas engaged with, including the late Canadian poets Nelson Ball and Michael Dennis,Montreal poet Hugh Thomas and Kingston poet Jason Heroux, with whom he has beencollaborating with for some time now, as evidenced through A FurtherIntroduction to Bingo (above/ground press, 2024). Certainly, Straumsvåg’spoems are oddly surreal, and I certainly wouldn’t know anything of the literarycontext from which Straumsvåg (and his first collection) emerged, but one easilysees this current selection of prose poems setting firmly and comfortably in atradition of poets such as the late American prose poet Russell Edson [see my review of his posthumous selected poems here] and American writer Lydia Davis[see a note I wrote on her work here], for example, for their shared appreciation for the slightly askew and surrealself-contained lyric prose narratives. “I’m sure it’s possible to accumulatesome wisdom in this life. There are a couple of mistakes, for example,” Straumsvåg’spoem “THE LITTLE TYKE” begins, “I’ll never repeat. But basically wisdom servesno practical purpose, and the added weight only leads to back pains, headaches,balance problems—a condition dumped in your lap like a baby you didn’t know youhad.” It would be interesting to be able to discern the more obvious Norwegianelements Straumsvåg weaves into his prose poems, but as yet, these are elementsof which I am otherwise and completely unaware.

Straumsvåg’spoems very much lean into what Edson spent decades crafting, an aesthetic andstructure of the short narrative with surreal edges, an aesthetic that alsotouches upon elements of the work of multiple other contemporary English-languageNorth American poets such as Stuart Ross himself [see my review of his latest here], Hamilton poet Gary Barwin [see my review of his latest poetry title here], Wisconsin poet Nate Logan [see my review of his latest collection here], and Chicago poet Benjamin Niespodziany [see my review of his latest here], among so many others.“The place was empty. No scissors, no combs or half-empty bottles of dye,” thepoem “ABANDONED DOG GROOMING SALON” begins, “no dog hairs on the floor, noposters of poodles. I turned the small room into a study, slept on a couch inthe back. The first year I dreamed of dogs every night. By the fifth, pets wereno longer allowed, and I stopped dreaming.”

Toplace that in a bit larger context of the North American prose poem, Straumsvågapproach seems marketedly different to the more lyric offerings of poets suchas the fractals of Toronto poet Margaret Christakos [see my review of her latest here] or Salt Lake City poet Lindsey Webb [see my review of her debut here], or thedirect statements and experiments by Canadian poets Lisa Robertson or Anne Carson [see my essay on her latest collection here]. There’s a directness to Straumsvåg’slyrics, working narratives that pull in and out of deliberate focus, unexpectedlyturning left or right or even across, never ending up in a place one mightexpect. His poems begin with a solid narrative foundation, heading in onedirection and then swerving elsewhere, either gradually or suddenly oraccumulatively, managing to exceed all expectations, with one step and thenanother towards truly odd corners and surfaces. Honestly, this is a delightful collection;is that something reviewers even say anymore? This is a delightful book, and I hopethere are more of them. “There has to be a mountain range near Tembakounda inGuinea that stretches east to the Central African Mountains of the Moon,” the titlepoem begins, “James Rennell thought. The source of the White Nile. So heintroduced it on a map he sketched for Travels in the Interior Districts ofAfrica by Mungo Park (1799), dividing the continent in two, and named itthe Mountains of Kong.”