Erik Vernersson
- Sweden -
born 1992 in Umeå – by the forest and the river where our life star has its setting.
If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all. But art is long and life is brief. The hum-drum town remains. So let me fade away into the forest dim and leave the wasteland far behind.
Rhymes, Resonance, and Elderly Care.
A Presentation of Erik Vernersson’s Poetry
Erik Vernersson was born in 1992 in Umeå and is living in Vännäs, Västerbotten County. Vännäs is an old farming community in the Ume River valley. It became a railway hub in the 1890s when northern Sweden was industrialized. The railway has since been rerouted and Vännäs has become a commuting town of Umeå, the university city located 30 kilometers closer to the coast.
Vernersson is twenty-two years younger than me. I moved to Stockholm before he was born, but during visits to my father in Vännäs I have met him now and then, exchanged greetings and a few words, and I have read his two collections of poetry: Body Language, Dead (AB, 2018) and Summertime in Sorrow in Sweden (AB, 2025). We are poets of different generations, but Vännäs we have in common and both of us have also worked with elderly care.
His debut book took the reader to places and linguistic states that challenged the idea of a disenchanted world, without denying a modernist poetry tradition. The poems take aim at both the technocratic language of our time and the timelessness of fairy tales. They are metrical but not rhymed. The book has also been described by literary reviewer as “eco poetry”.
In his second collection, Summertime in Sorrow in Sweden, he writes a poetic contemporary fable, using end rhymes, slant rhymes, and even deliberate absences of rhyme. Snapshots from elderly care work are set against the nature changes and a Swedish poetic tradition from Pär Lagerkvist to Ann Jäderlund.
The book is musical. Sometimes in the form of sonnets, but not iambic, rather with a falling rhythm. “More constrained, less optimistic,” as the poet and critic Eva Ström has written. The tone, in minor key, connects to the marginalization of old people in the elderly care system in Sweden. Vernersson knows what he’s talking about, he works in that field.
The words schedule, shift, and safety alarm appear throughout the book, thematizing the forms of both poetry and society. The language is rhythmic, his choice of words seems sometimes odd. End rhymes are often used as surprising elements – “a creative disruption and control device,” in words of the German poet Jan Wagner. However, the central theme of the poem is not at all difficult to grasp: how we care for our elderly says something about who we have become, who we are, and who we want to be.
The poet’s use of an old verse form can be seen as a playful tribute to a generation when rhymed songs and poems were the norm. But Vernersson’s method is not just nostalgic, it is updated, and he is aware of the risk in portraying a fragile and uncertain existence in the form of a perfect sonnet.
Translating rhyme is tricky. Without fully rewriting, this is what it looks like literally:
The safety alarm’s necklace
hurting the skin. God who holds
the children dear in cross-stitch writing
schedules the shifts of care.
The octaves of bird songs
float unattainably over
sleeplessness at two a’clock.
The tread of the picture’s verse is blue.
“The gradual disappearance of rhyme from our language happened roughly in connection with the change around 1900, from oral stage poetry to individual reading in the armchair by a reading lamp,” in words of critic and author Niklas Schiöler in Svenska Dagbladet. But rhymes in Swedish poetry did not lose ground until after World War II. Then individualism and the breaking away from older norms could no longer be expressed in fixed meter and recurring rhyme in the same way as before. Free verse took over. Schiöler continues: “You often have to read modernists and later poets in advance to fully appreciate them being read aloud.” So how does this apply to Vernersson’s poetry?
In 2025, his poetry is both rhythmic and rhymed. The poet is reading in Swedish in front of an audience where most of those present have not read the poems in advance. The word “I” does not appear in his latest book, in stark contrast to our hyper-individualized era. (Well, almost. The I word appears once. I’ll come back to that.)
Schiöler wrote his essay on rhymed verse in 2018, the same year as Vernersson’s first book came out. Had Vernersson read the essay and decided to challenge ideas of subjectivity and rhyme? If so, seven years later, he has succeeded – with a cohesive poem that is far from impersonal. In Vernersson’s work it is the rhythm and rhymes that build the voice and allow the reader – and the listener – to follow him through the landscape, with interruptions for catheter changes and other daily routines in the elderly care home.
The melodies of the summer night
embroidered letters
criss-crossing along tissue death.
The safety alarm’s center is red.
All the love we need
turns into longing; longing lulls
the one who has listened in the end.
The iron sparrow leaves its twig.
Schiöler describes a spectrum of rhyme practices: “To let barely visible rhymes sneak in or let rhyme proudly stomp and advertise its presence.”
End rhyme determines the length of the line and creates a pressure that ties two or more lines together through repetition. These repetitions generate expectations in the reader, Schiöler writes, and this is where Vernersson’s practice might meet resistance: he sometimes avoids expected rhymes to instead play with assonance. It’s skillfully done. Some might claim that the poet can’t write a full sonnet crown (simply because he avoids doing it) but that is missing the point, the bullseye.
Vernersson’s poetry is ethically attuned and carefully written. It speaks – in rhymed verse in the making – of social structures unraveling, of streamlining and dehumanization. Poetry dares to do what politics and the economic system can’t afford, won’t dare or is not able to do. The poet himself has aptly said his verse “is connected to the dismantled safety nets.”
Tenderness, dignity, justice. Where, if not through the art of language, can these grand ideas be restored? At the very least, we can try to reevaluate the work of the assistant nurse, he says in an interview – “and not give in to the cynic, who thinks he knows what everything costs but doesn’t want to know what anything is really worth.”
So what about the word “I” in Vernersson’s latest book? The I poem goes like this: “Var är den vän jag söker, var? / Överallt och onåbar.” In English: Where is the friend I am looking for? / Everywhere and unreachable. Is it about social loneliness? The poet’s view of the nature? Or the voice of the soul? Located in the middle of the book (page 41 of 91 pages), this passage might just as well be about an abandoned God.
Since the 1990s, there occasionally appears a poetry collection in Swedish – rhymed or metrically constructed – that casts another light on the dominant free verse poetry, like Lotta Olsson’s Skuggor och speglingar (1994), Magnus William-Olsson’s Ingersonetterna (2010), Malte Persson’s Underjorden (2011), and now Erik Vernersson’s Sommartid i sorg i Sverige.
Last winter, I ran into him by the Ume River. March, a sunny morning, and the snow crust still held. A special feeling – to walk nearly a meter above the ground. He wanted to show me some of his favorite paths on the other side of the river. We walked across the river ice, heard a chainsaw in the distance. Birds singing. We saw deer eating in the snow. We talked, and there was a resonance in our conversation. The young poet had gifts that the older poet did not know anything about. You can write rhymed verse in many ways. In Erik Vernersson’s poetry I have found something that I otherwise find only when I move from my father’s room in the nursing home to the northern river landscape outside his window.
Written by Pär Hansson
Poetry
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