Nattmannen
“In my childhood I heard many stories about nightmen, or outcasts, as they were also called. They were the ones who carried out the tasks no one else would touch. Everyone despised the outcasts. And feared them.
When I began writing Nattmannen, he met me at once. He is now so real to me that I can no longer distinguish his shame from my own.
In poetry, I appoint the Nightman master of degradation.
I appoint him as the resistance I have always felt and still feel, the resistance to that which, time and again and by the same means, separates one human being from another.” Ingela Strandberg
A darker, more confrontational work, this book explores marginality, violence and the animal within the human. Critics emphasised its ethical seriousness and its refusal of psychological simplification.
Pressvoices
“All that can be said of Ingela Strandberg is that she keeps getting better with age. The Nightman and her previous collection Snaring a Bird are her two finest works. Now I want her to receive the August Prize.Opulens
“Is Strandberg’s sinister poetic world a dream or a waking state? It doesn’t matter.
A concentrated imaginative vision of the outcasts of earlier times.”
Borås Tidning
“Her imagery is both beautiful and brutal, hovering between reality and fantasy.”
Dala-Demokraten
“Her poems are accessible, yet unpredictable, like remote-controlled missiles. You never know where they come from, but they strike, and nothing is the same afterward.”
Sveriges Radio
“A collection that insists on the animal and the darkness within the human being.”
Göteborgs-Posten
“Strandberg allows a relatively simple poetry – rich in sparkling images and shaped by a rhythm made for reading aloud – to summon another cosmos and a clearer world. To thematically bind what might be called redemptive visions, as she does in the new book, is a brilliant idea that forms something deeply moving.”
Dagens Nyheter
Ingela Strandberg (born 1944) is one of the most significant contemporary Nordic poets, whose major recognition arrived late in life. After decades of writing with quiet intensity, her work has in recent years been recognised as a late-period mastery of rare depth and authority. Rooted in the rural landscapes of southern Sweden, Strandberg’s poetry moves…
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About the book
“In my childhood I heard many stories about nightmen, or outcasts, as they were also called. They were the ones who carried out the tasks no one else would touch. Everyone despised the outcasts. And feared them.
When I began writing Nattmannen, he met me at once. He is now so real to me that I can no longer distinguish his shame from my own.
In poetry, I appoint the Nightman master of degradation.
I appoint him as the resistance I have always felt and still feel, the resistance to that which, time and again and by the same means, separates one human being from another.” Ingela Strandberg
A darker, more confrontational work, this book explores marginality, violence and the animal within the human. Critics emphasised its ethical seriousness and its refusal of psychological simplification.
Pressvoices
“All that can be said of Ingela Strandberg is that she keeps getting better with age. The Nightman and her previous collection Snaring a Bird are her two finest works. Now I want her to receive the August Prize.Opulens
“Is Strandberg’s sinister poetic world a dream or a waking state? It doesn’t matter.
A concentrated imaginative vision of the outcasts of earlier times.”
Borås Tidning
“Her imagery is both beautiful and brutal, hovering between reality and fantasy.”
Dala-Demokraten
“Her poems are accessible, yet unpredictable, like remote-controlled missiles. You never know where they come from, but they strike, and nothing is the same afterward.”
Sveriges Radio
“A collection that insists on the animal and the darkness within the human being.”
Göteborgs-Posten
“Strandberg allows a relatively simple poetry – rich in sparkling images and shaped by a rhythm made for reading aloud – to summon another cosmos and a clearer world. To thematically bind what might be called redemptive visions, as she does in the new book, is a brilliant idea that forms something deeply moving.”
Dagens Nyheter
