Erkka Filander
- Finland -
Erkka Filander (b. 1993) is a poet living in Turku. He also works as the head editor of the Poesiavihkot chapbook series, published by the co-operative publishing house Poesia.
Filander’s debut book Heräämisen valkea myrsky (2013) won the Helsingin Sanomat Literary Prize in 2013 and was shortlisted for The European Poet of Freedom prize in 2018. Written at 19 years old, Heräämisen valkea myrsky is an eruption of youthful joy and ambiguous desire. Torso (2016), his second poetry book, won the Tommy Tabermann award and was shortlisted for the Tanssiva karhu poetry prize. His chapbook Adoraatio (2018) delves into the figure and mystery of John the Baptist, and his most recent work, Siemenholvi (2025), is a monumental (both in size and scope) lamentation, mixing traditional poetical forms and meters with huge fragmentary spaces to create a vault-like book.
Filander intends to use the upcoming years to find out whether beauty could nevertheless save us.
The bleak gospel – Erkka Filander’s uncompromising poetry
Erkka Filander (b. 1993) has a somewhat unusual background for a contemporary Finnish poet: he never went to high school but instead, at the age of 16, after finishing 9th grade and thus the compulsory education in Finland, stayed at home to write. Many have been thankful for his parents since for letting their child have a mind of his own. While the majority of Finnish poets in the 21st century have university degrees or at least unfinished studies in higher education, Filander’s path has clearly been different.
Either paradoxically, or very logically – depending on your view of institutional education – Filander has a remarkably deep understanding of Western literary tradition combined with a thorough knowledge of art history, classical music and football. Perhaps Don Paterson’s – himself an autodidact who dropped out of school at 16 to later become a professor of poetry at the University of St Andrews – point about autodidacts applies very accurately to Filander as well: ”When you always feel others know more than you because of their education you read and learn ferociously just to make up for your lack of schooling and often end up being much more thoroughly read than those who can rely on their degree or diploma.” (Quoted from memory.)
At the age of 19, in 2013, Filander’s debut Heräämisen valkea myrsky (The White Storm of Awakening) was published by Poesia (then a fairly new publishing cooperative run by poets) and went on to win the prestigious prize for the best Finnish language debut book of the year, Helsingin Sanomien kirjallisuuspalkinto.
The White Storm of Awakening is a book of exuberant joy in being alive and young and having had the amazing chance to be born into a body on this planet – on a beautiful summer morning. The curtains are billowing, the creek is there for a morning swim, the deer and the apple blossoms, the large windows and the sun-dappled lawn, the brightness and the freshness, all seem to be there just for us. The world is catered effortlessly and unquestionably for the young perceiver of the poem whose tone is that of praise and energy. Still as fresh as a child but already as capable as an adult, the speaker of the long swirling poem that makes up the whole book, is bursting with joy and life. The hazy moment of waking up, when the privacy of sleep is lost and the totality of the world is gained, is prolonged through the book in endless twirling of rich metaphorical language.
Subjective but elusive, like his later work as well, The White Storm of Awakening is crafted of language one might unashamedly call poetic. Mixing abstract concepts and ideas with accurate sense-perceptions, breaking up the syntax of sentences – while being strongly committed to sentences instead of operating on a smaller scale of words or phonemes, like a minimalist or a conceptualist might – and chasing the strange glorious vision of absolute beauty set in every sunset or choir piece or death or tree bough; these are all hallmarks of Filander’s literary expression. The line is medium length, more short than long, the rhythm is free and lively and the stanzas vary in length. The language is accelerated, almost out of breath with unceasing wonder in front of the mere phenomenon of existing, here and now. ”The body is sacred it carries / gravity and under its skin / light grows like a field / to be once ploughed, opened.”
Filander’s second book, Torso (Torso), came out in 2016. It is longer and clearly more fragmentary than its predecessor. It is an exploration on martyrdom and architecture – stone architecture, I’m certain, though it’s never made explicit, but the buildings of Torso, the churches, monuments and cells are not of wood. We’re dealing here with the heaviness and non-organic materiality of stone and it is contrasted with the frailty of the human body following a decision that might destroy it. What seems to bridge these different domains of stone vaults and pressured necks are orthodox icons: inanimate objects that regarded with a certain attitude, perhaps devotion, glow with a light that surpasses individuals and generations.
Where The White Storm of Awakening shows shadows as delightful minor occurrences caused by the Sun’s great force, Torso is much more a book of shadows, where a beam of light stands out against different kinds of darkness. The intensity, the quest after an intense experience in language, is the same as in the debut, but the tone of joy has evolved into something else: The focus is on that which is meaningful - what matters to us so much it has the power to organize our lives - and that isn't necessarily wonderful, or joyous. The fragmented form of Torso builds this understanding very successfully.
Somewhat noticeable in Filander's work is the fact that he has published quite rarely. After the first two volumes of poetry he has also worked a lot behind the scenes: having joined the cooperative publishing house Poesia he has lately been the editor in charge of its chapbook series, Poesiavihkot. His editorial output, felt on a lot of writers, is especially significant in Leevi Lehto's translation of Jonh Keats' poetry Syksylle ja muita runoja ja kirjeitä (To Autumn and other poems and letters, 2020 Poesia.) Lehto was ill and passed away before the translation was published and Filander's long term infatuation with the English Romantics was of great use in their common effort to bring Keats' poems in new translation to Finnish audiences.
Adoraatio (Adoratio) is a chapbook by Filander that appeared in 2018. 'Adoraatio' is a very technical, imported-sounding word in Finnish which carries connotations of the English word 'adoration' so strongly it would feel incorrect to plainly translate is as ‘adoration’. So I've chosen the hopefully more artefact-like Latin-sounding ‘adoratio’. The tercets of Adoratio take as their inspiration the more or less ecstatic tradition of picturing St John the Baptist in sacred art. While following on the themes of martyrdom and being called by one’s devotion to abandon one’s life as one knows it (it’s surely no coincidence that Torso bears the name it does and Rilke’s sonnet “Archaic Torso of Apollo” ends with “You must change your life.”) Adoratio also somehow manages to be emphatic love poetry.
The regulated structure, tight tercets and the mythical-historical subject matter perhaps make it possible a bit secretively to present, as in disguise, some of the most passionate, accurate expressions of lust in contemporary Finnish poetry. St John the Baptist is a figure that raises much passion, no doubt. (The Orthodox Church for example celebrates the Third Finding of the Precious Head of the aforementioned saint – the holy head having been lost a couple of times in the course of history.) Adoratio truly is language that adores, though what exactly, is pleasingly ambivalent.
After seven years of silence since Adoratio we come to Filander’s latest and greatest work, Siemenholvi (literally: Seed Vault). At the time of writing this Siemenholvi is only a few weeks old and larger than anything I’ve ever seen published as original poetry (i.e. not anthologies or facsimiles of historical books) in any language in my life time. Its dimensions of 30 cm x 40 cm and its page count of 354 make it seem more like the Times Atlas of the World or a massive dictionary than a volume of poetry. It is at once a gigantic monument of confidence in printed poetry and a fearful challenge to the scattered concentration of our digital time.
Fragmented bleak gospels alternate with meticulously structured long poems, and at the zenith of the book is a potent curse. Straight through its name Siemenholvi takes the reader to questions of ecological crises (plural intended), loss and anger at the human hubris fuelled by oil and greed into unseen dimensions. But it also functions as a linguistic archive, gathering expressions and poetic forms much like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault aims to store and conserve biological crop diversity.
As a poet Filander has come a long way from the rejoicing faith in life of his debut to the complex and infinitely ambitious monument of loss that is Siemenholvi. What runs through his work unchanged is passion, an attitude towards poetry that is never lukewarm, never ready for compromise. Without fuss or dramatics but with full conviction Filander’s poetry seems to say ‘Yes, there are things larger than life and this is where we deal with them’.
By Raisa Marjamäki
Poetry
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Extract pp. 7-13 / Ote sivuilta 7–13
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Μελαναιγις / Μελαναιγις
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Ψιλαξ / Ψιλαξ
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Λαμπτηρος / Λαμπτηρος
