Ida Brytnér

Ida Brytnér was born in 1986 in Älvsbyn, Norrbotten County, in the north part of Sweden. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Linnaeus University, majoring in Creative Writing, alongside with complementary studies in literary composition, literary studies and aesthetics at Stockholm’s university and the University of Gothenburg. 

 

As a poet, she has been published in a number of Swedish literary magazines and in the fall of 2023 Brytnér debuted with the poetry collection The Folds, The Coves (Vecken, vikarna), published by the independent editor Aska Förlag. In her debut, Brytnér sets out to explore the depiction of the self, as well as the boundaries that simultaneously encloses and dissolves the self. 

 

During the fall of 2024 the poetry suite ACROSS IT ALL STRETCHES THE SKIN (ÖVER ALLTING SPÄNNER HUDEN) was published by the small Swedish publisher Edition Tegnér.

The Swedish poet Ida Brytnér was born in 1986 in Älvsbyn in northern Sweden and currently lives in Umeå where she is working with municipal adult education.  She is on the board for Norrländska Litteratursällskapet/Författarcentrum Norr, an NGO promoting literature and writing in the North. Some of her first publications were in the northern literary magazine Provins. She has published texts in other magazines and anthologies, as well as in the recent chapbook Över allting spänner huden (‘Over everything the skin is stretched’, 2024), but her main contribution is the full-length poetry collection Vecken, vikarna (’The folds, the coves’), published in 2023 by Aska Förlag.

Her poetry is positioned in the crossroads of language materialism and Swedish lyrical modernism, characterized by the sampling or collection of short utterances and statements, most of them concerning the human body, but also about the landscape and the nature. The corporeality of the poems – often mentioning the hand, the mouth, the throat, the lips, the eye – is underlined by the recurrent observations of bodily sensations: To smell, taste, feel. But this human body is also threatened and scarred by abstraction and fragmenting, something which is visible in the graphic design where the words are dispersed over the white pages:  

 

The waterside, the dark green border of

 

the trees

 

is the truth something else are we smoke and mirrors are we someone

 

else

 

Remember We

 

remember and remember

 

until we no longer know

 

(translation by Lars Gustaf Andersson)

 

The words are simple nouns and verbs, but the slightly confusing, syncopated grammar blurs the difference between questions and answers and makes the identities of the subjects floating. Cause and effect seem to change place and the chronological order of moments is broken. The poems work in present tense which at the same time is after and before the breakdown, or the apocalypse. Because something is broken here, the world is as fragmented as the stanzas. Something has happened. 

Obviously, the identity of the subject is under pressure and questioned. Instead of “I” and “me”, we read a lot of “we” and “us”, turning the individual statements into collective utterances. There are several voices in the poems, as in a choir, but the hymns are silenced, fragmented, hard to hear, and it is impossible to discern the hierarchy of the voices; it is a composition which never displays a counterpoint. 

The problematic subject is tormented by a problematic body, seeming to fall apart in every moment:

 

The vaulting of an eye

 

The skin creeps, is dyed

 

Dark blue closeness

 

The room of deafness

 

(translation by Lars Gustaf Andersson)

 

Sometimes it seems that the process is final, that there are no ways of escape, but all of a sudden there is a glimpse of hope: “Ljuset återvände”/ “The light returned”.

There are no names mentioned in her poems of people and places, but a way to understand them are as testimonies from the northern provinces, its mountains and woods with creeks and paths, far away from the urban turmoil. The dispersed stanzas and words can be read as memory fragments, and the memories of something lost or something never fulfilled is visible on the pages. The memory work is intertwined with dreaming, and like most dreams the dreams in the poems are interrupted or lost:

 

In the oriel

the sound

behind the pain The loss of language

the lines of flight

 

And now:

(translation by Saskia Vogel)

 

The dreams and memories of a world before the language are transposed into a lyrical dictionary which reminds us as readers of the double nature of memory work; we work with the memory but we also work with the translation of the memory into words for others, e. g. poetry. And the lines of Ida Brytnér bear testimony to the hardship and resistance that the memories and dreams offer. The singular poem is the translation of the dream or the memory that had no language to begin with. The poem is always betraying the memory but is at the same time the only way to save it. Poetry is pharmakon, it is a poison as well as a remedy. The poetry of Ida Brytnér is thus also a meta-poetry, stating this paradox of the poetry. And still, there are lines that seem to be there just for our pleasure, for the joy of language: “Glaset /härdat//samlar/oss, det gröna/mörknar” – “The glass/ hardened//gathers/ us, the green/ darkens”.

 

- Lars Gustaf Andersson