Casper André Lugg

Casper André Lugg (b.1985) is a Norwegian poet and translator. He made his debut in 2011 with Lite rekviem (English translation: Small Requiem) and received the prestigious Bokhandelens writer’s grant in 2016. Since then, he is considered one of the most important new voices in contemporary Norwegian poetry. In total he has published 8 poetry collections. Lugg’s four first poetry collections were collected for the first time in a single, authoritative volume called Havet er her allerede (English translation: The sea is already here) in 2018. The latest published collection De minste bærer vann (English: The smallest carry water) was a commissioned work for Møllebyen literature festival in 2022. Casper André Lugg’s upcoming poetry collection tilhørighetstersklene (English translation: Thresholds of belonging) will be published in the fall of 2025.  

Casper André Lugg (b. 1985) made his debut with the poetry collection Lite rekviem («Small Requiem") in 2011, followed by Dagene er som gress ( "The Days Are Like Grass") in 2015. For these two collections, he was awarded Bokhandelens forfatterstipend (the Norwegian Booksellers’ Author Grant). Since then, his poetry collections have appeared in rapid succession: Nymånedagene ( “New Moon Days”, 2016), Det store svaet ( "The Great Rock Slope", 2017), Tilgi det virkeliges blomstring ("Forgive the Blossoming of the Real", 2018), mariabiotopene ("The Mary Biotopes", 2020), sted for løpende hjerte ("Place for a Running Heart", 2021), and de minste bærer vann ("The Smallest Carry Water", 2022). Despite this high publishing frequency, which is unusual for a poet, Lugg’s works have consistently maintained a high literary standard. This has been reflected in the critical reception, where his consistently exploratory authorship and uncompromising crafting of language have been highlighted. In a short time, he has established himself as one of the foremost poets of his generation, if not in contemporary Norwegian poetry overall. Lugg’s body of work is both distinctive and widely resonant, as evidenced by the support from publishers: in 2018, his first four collections were compiled in the volume Havet er her allerede ("The Sea Is Already Here") with an afterword by prominent Norwegian contemporary poet Steinar Opstad (b. 1971), and in 2025, a selection from his first eight books will be published as Det er lytt mellom diktet og verden ("There Is Sound Escaping Between the Poem and the World"), edited and with an afterword by poet and critic Katrine Heiberg (b. 1992). Lugg's ninth poetry collection, tilhørighetstersklene ("The Thresholds of Belonging"), is also due in 2025.

In one sense, Casper André Lugg is a nature poet: almost everything he writes springs from encounters with nature and its elements, its transformations, and its forms of communication. Birds, trees, plants, and animals — often in the form of the most common species and landscape features of Lugg’s home region of Østfold in southeastern Norway — appear on equal footing with humans. His attention to nature stems from an existential attitude in which nature represents a fundamental condition of life and is also rooted in Christian faith, where nature is God’s creation and a place where the lyrical self (the human) can draw near to God and find grace.

Nature is image, manifestation, language, and life in Lugg’s poems. In his first four books, nature is perhaps primarily a metaphor for the fundamental elements of existence and our relationship with our surroundings. In the later collections —beginning with Tilgi det virkeliges blomstring —nature emerges as life forms in their own right, a kind of teeming presence with which the self is set in relation to as well as partakes in. Through imagery and tactile descriptions, readers can almost feel themselves present in that nature and the moments being evoked. Reading Lugg can slow and expand one’s sense of time and sharpen the senses; a reviewer in the Norwegian newspaper Vårt Land wrote: “It’s as if the poems manage to transfer their own open and circular time to the reader.”

Yet, even though the poems have a meditative quality and are in many ways an uplifting, even therapeutic project, they are not free from critical thinking or irresolvable tensions. While nature offers belonging and calls for humility, the estrangement of humans from nature is continually emphasized. Already in his debut Lite rekviem, the opposition between humanity and nature, and between language and body, is addressed: “The distance / between saying grass / and walking // barefoot over”. The inherent conflict in giving language to the world lies in how words create a distance from it. This paradox is a foundational theme in Lugg’s work, as both an existential and ethical issue that surfaces in various forms throughout his writing, as in this short poem from de minste bærer vann (2022):

I see the name-forest 

the name-mountain the name-snowfield the name-heather

it is lonely

to give in to the wind

Lugg’s authorship can be divided in two: the first four books consist of beautifully crafted, image-rich, and rounded poems offering the reader a coherent thought or insight. From the fifth collection, Tilgi det virkeliges blomstring (2018), this form is broken up. Here we encounter a more fragmented, open, and sensory language, where statements feel more detached, non-conclusive, and less intellectualized but more embodied. An exploratory stance emerges, including questions that run throughout the collection: “what blossoming depths am I moving along,” “how to grow / in a matter that strips me,” “what does it mean to see clearly.”

The early poems cultivate harmony between language, form, and meaning, while the later poems open a space where readers may dwell in the language and images without being led toward a fixed interpretation. The central concept of his body of work is forgiveness. Lugg uses the word in new and unfamiliar ways, detaching it from its traditional meaning. Forgiveness appears alternately as a figure, a state, and a context; it also takes on a mystical materiality, as in this poem:

I turn four times in the wind
forgiveness appears in plural
like the hazel-like growth of language
or a room for each blossoming
snow and ash fall differently

With his creative use of “forgiveness,” Lugg suggests that there is potential to form new connections with nature, based on something other than different forms of exploitation. This, he proposes, can be achieved through changes in language, which in turn alter relationships, and thereby also the space and the world.

In the subsequent collections — mariabiotopene, sted for løpende hjerte, and de minste bærer vann — Lugg continues to explore a more explorational and unpredictable voice. This in turn produces a new kind of engagement with the reader: a poetic form that demands a different kind of attention, a willingness to listen and remain within the poems. In mariabiotopene, the French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil (1909–1943) is a clear reference point. The book opens with a quote from Gravity and Grace: “There is only one fault: incapacity to feed upon light”. Weil uses photosynthesis as a metaphor for a perfect form of life, where light represents God’s grace—in contrast to humanity’s tendency to be dragged down by desire and pettiness, which she calls gravity. Lugg writes: “I have replaced my almost kind / my humankind / for a vegetative prayer”, verse lines affirming moving away from identification with the human, toward what could be interpreted as a passive and receptive state. In mariabiotopene, nature, its life forms, and manifestations become a springboard for philosophical reflection and an intensified focus on the ecological crisis, which is always present in the background.

Though sorrow often lies as a tone and an expressed state in Lugg’s work, his poems are always imbued with hope. In de minste bærer vann, the recurring motif is water and how it connects all living things as it travels between landscapes, organisms, sky, and sea. The poems in this collection go far in uniting plant and human life and may represent Lugg’s most insistent attempt to give voice to nature itself, by borrowing the plants’ own senses. Here, nature is animated without shame, and we encounter a more unreserved exchange between human and plant, poem and nature, through direct addresses to the vegetation (“I call you witness”) and in how the poems themselves are placed within nature, as in this passage:

the poem goes from the ankle-forest
to the waist-forest
light path and water rhythm
down into the soil
fall in the greenery
bog and ore in uneven mirrors

In this poem, Lugg celebrates the meeting between language and nature. It is not a glorification of nature for its own sake, but a hopeful song to what connects life forms: light and water. Each poetry collection from Lugg takes this lyrical project in new directions, driven by a desire to set the human relationship to nature — the origin of life, the foundation of life, the creation of life — in motion.

Written by Katrine Heiberg / Translated by Camilla Holm Soelseth