Poetry is hard to discuss, because poetry speaks for itself. Of course, one can make generalizations about poetry and hope that they will say something. Examples? One can look at poetry as a special way of stopping time. In turn, stopping time in poetry, or poetry that has the ability to stop time, can also be seen as two contradictive ways of speaking: actuality and the story of time. Let us try to look at the guests of our festival in this aspect for a moment – regardless of the fact that poetry can never be forced into one single aspect, but is – quoting Saila Susiluoto, a visionary and fairy-like poetess – a free bird tied to the heights of heaven.

 

One can sense that the majority of poets attending the festival are focusing on the story of time, on what kind of stories our time is telling to people, what is inside and behind time. Here there seem to be two strong visions. First – a vision of the temporality of things, and second – a vision of the story of the time of the heart. The first aims to leave a mark that fades more slowly than the person who left it; the second aims to change past to present, and actually these aims are part of one and the same: poetic remembrance. Remembrance meaning stopping time, crossing over time and timelessness.

Temporality is strongly present in the tender-volatile, yet sensuous poetry of Jessie Kleeman of Greenland. The temporality is expressed through contradictions that are born on the landscape of Kleeman's fathomless country, the kiss of an iceberg speaks candidly about the frailness of life. Denmark's Mette Moestrup doesn't want anyone to bring her lilies or bones, but lilies and bones are the material of her poetry, her illusion-free visions seem like the lost wings of a butterfly being carried away in the wind. Also, temporality floats about in the sombre and nostalgic writings of Sergey Zavyalov of St. Petersburg; death overcomes love, but the roots of love stay in eternity at the moment of being in love.

 

Memory and remembrance form the thin but persisting spine of Lars Saabye Christensen's poetry. Christensen keeps looking back at the marvellous statues of past. For Christensen, remembrance is always a trace of someone else – a person, a landscape – and words are what he is using to build a bridge across that landscape – towards people. An even more deeply dedicated apologist of intimacy, or more specifically – love, is the Finnish Swedish poetess and author Märta Tikkanen, who casts aside linguistic security measures such as punctuation every now and then, when she is speaking about love and its antonym – solitude, making the text as fluid as her yearn and desire. In the writings of Vigdís Grímsdóttir – an Icelandic novelist – that chase the reader like lava, love entwines with power like a serpent, freedom with solitude, intimacy with death. Grímsdóttir's spirit rebels against assumption.

A title for the story of the time of the heart might come from Tone Hødnebø of Norway: "Oh, beloved, remain in my heart." That line embraces both the opposition to temporality and the wish to tear away all flesh from the heart and halt it into an affectionate story.

It was said that behind creating stories and songs about the time of the heart, there lies a yearn to change past to present – this impression might be induced or intensified by reading Jacques Werup. Speaking about his memories, Werup uses present tense, as if all of it is happening here and now. And in fact, it does: the grid of memories has been weaved into the present with words, and thus the beautiful recollections heading towards evanescence no longer depend on one, who remembers.

If Werup may be characterized by brightness, then in the poetry of Tóroddur Poulsen one can find stubborn and crude humour, and the spirit of focusing firmly on what is, instead of what or how it once was. Instead of stories of the heart, Poulsen, an ancient pine and sentient conjurer made by the winds and waves of the Faeroe Islands, tells of what is in and on one's mind right now. From Iceland, an island with an even harder climate, comes Andri Snær Magnason, who's spirit wanders in an unhindered manner from volcanic love to mapping consumerism with a knowing half-smile.

 

It is evident why Eva Runefelt is invited to the festival again and again. In her entwine the realization and denial of the temporal nature of life, the clinging to glitters born from the joint effect of words and the heart, and a desire to remember and commemorate. Runefelt's poetry is vivid proof of the fact, that in addition to evanescence and a strive to escape its flow, it hides and displays something more. Something that is represented in words, but what words cannot catch. The words are like ambassadors, the country itself is behind the horizon, or is the horizon. Perhaps this is a kind of intuitive visionary or sighted quality that has also been used to describe the poetry Tomas Tranströmer. He has written that sometimes in the darkness of life, he opens his eyes, listening to the heavy footsteps of the heart. Perhaps one might call it looking at the dark with only one eye – the heart.

 

But one can find another kind of poetry at the festival, too – poetry that instead of eternity and stopping the time attempts to speak about time here and now. Like Poulsen and Magnason, in a way, but in a more direct and immediate manner. The favourites of the festival include two poets who observe the modern reality; one of them – Tapani Kinnunen – does it with great bravado and voluptuousness, and the other – Gintaras Grayauskas – in a laconic, almost dispassionate manner. However, these two men are tied by a warm sense of humour; irony that stings, but doesn't hurt. Instead of the story of the heart, these men cordially talk about the art of life.

Both men live on the border between the East and the West, where influences collide and ideas cross. One can feel how evanescence, history, desire of the heart to grow eternally and a sharp look at the present world are drawn together in Valts Ernshtreits of Livonia, a man of the same longitude and generation as Kinnunen and Grayauskas.

 

Overwhelmingly many paths that all in some miraculous way happen to cross in Tallinn for a couple of days. Perhaps this short-lived time will leave some undying traces and add its part into the possibility that these paths will not grass over – at least for some time.