“One of those rare poetic achievements that thrums with both spiritual resonance and contemporary urgency.”— Forrest Gander, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Mojave Ghost“A highly perceptive, evocative, and melodic description of landscape and memory. Söderlund writes mesmerizing poetry about the membrane that separates man from the inherent forces of nature. Eskatos & the Stretched Necks of Stillness is and will remain one of the most beautiful works I have read.”— Dorthe Nors, author of A Line In the World: a Year on the North Sea Coast“No poem that I know—nothing that I have read—has so captured the experience of moving through the forest—the ancient forest, the original forest, the oneiric forest, the final forest—as award-winning Swedish poet Mats Söderlund’s book-length poem.”— Nina Maclaughlin, author of Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung“As feverish as it is a sad meditation and swan song over the living and the dead, foreshadowing and mood. Over everything that exists simultaneously, independent of clocks and calendars.”— Jan Karlsson, Kristianstadbladet“There is no doubt where the reader is being taken: it is to the echo chamber where the dead and the living meet, and in this poem the collision takes place in mother nature, in a wilderness that smells and lives. . . . One is thrown from season to season, between concrete experiences and dreamlike sequences, past and present in something that could be described as a kind of controlled, automatic writing. Or a poetic tongue.”— Anders Edwartz, Dagensbok“As a nature poet, Söderlund celebrates new triumphs above all in the tangible depiction of autumn nature, the forest with its withered leaves, dropsy lingonberries, the fog, the raw moisture.”— Michel Ekman, Svenska Dagbladet“The poetic tone shifts between beautiful nature lyrics, sadness, joy, despair and anger, sometimes both biblical and Homeric in its fury.”— Jakob Carlander, Uppsala New Newspaper“A small masterpiece. . . . The everyday world and the realm of death merge into one image in the work of Mats Söderlund. He joins a vast tradition of descriptions of the afterlife from the twelfth song of the Odyssey to Gunnar Ekelöf’s poem Voices under the Earth and Willy Granqvist's Natten. One can hear echoes of the death-obsessed baroque, from Stagnelius, from Martinson (directly quoted). In a strange way, this book rises out of its literary political contemporaries and begins to speak to the classics on an equal footing. I have rarely seen a book in recent years that has so little regard for the prevailing poetic fashions.”— Magnus Ringgren, Aftonbladet“In nonfiction, Söderlund is personal and experimental, he weaves his own memories of mountain hiking and the male cult of achievement with new insights and perspectives. In poetry, the sound is duller and the form more austere. There is a harsher relentlessness but also a greater space. . . . Of course there are images here, but it is the rhythm and the song that dominate. The play between sound and silence.”— Anna Hallberg, Dagens Nyheter“In this collection. . . the mythological apocalypse alternates with the meteorological, hope coexists with hopelessness, and robins with the invasive silkworm.”— Ale Låke, Dagens ETC"It is with grit and poetic perfectionism that Söderlund has crafted a golden farewell letter to our dying mother earth. . . And I can’t help but be captivated.”— Nicko Smith, Nickopoet
