The title above is borrowed from an interview in the magazine Plaza Kvinna (1998, 1) with a versatile young Swede who has made a name for herself in recent years in several branches of the creative arts. Johanna Ekström, born in Stockholm in 1970 and now living and working in the capital, is a writer and visual artist who has also presented installations, sculptures and photo-graphic exhibitions, collaborative and solo, at galleries around Sweden. A child of writers, she grew up in an atmosphere where language was what mattered, and she has now added a visual dimension to her linguistic inheritance. This can be seen not only in her art, but also in the varied and often unusual imagery of her poetry and prose.

As a writer, Johanna Ekström is still in the process of creating herself, her growing boldness and self-confidence attracting increasing critical attention in Sweden. She has experimented with various genres, publishing collections of poems, prose poems and, just a few weeks ago, a book of short stories. Her debut in published poetry was Skiffer (Slate, Bonniers, 1993). The poems are tactile and full of contrasts: light and dark, sun and shadow, black and white, stone and blood, sharp rocks and frail, torn skin. The natural world is signalled in the title and ubiquitous in the imagery of the poems, where it is perceived as elemental rather than decorative, the scenery of a largely hostile universe: fields in fog, icy wind and frost; the sea, the sky, jagged stones. Animals pursue their instinctive course yet mirror the human condition: a sharp-eyed eagle surveys the landscape; a droning fly tries to drill its way through a window pane; a flatfish hides in the sand. The poems are full of disembodied, vulnerable human parts yearning to make contact: a face here, a shoulder blade there, and eyes everywhere, seeing. Humans are ultimately perish-able and powerless, calves (a recurrent Ekström motif) to the slaughter:

Han har hamnat närmare döden
Han har inte valt
Som man knuffas omkring
i en buss med ståplatser
Inte jag!
Inte som kalvar!
Då skrattar Gud!

He finds himself closer to death
It was not his choice
Like being thrown around
On a bus with no seats
Not me!
Not like calves!
Then God will laugh!

Vitöga (White of the Eye, Bonniers, 1994) is a companion volume to Skiffer rather than a sequel, elaborating on many of the same themes. The world seems more hostile than ever and needs to be confronted with greater courage — thus the title with its connotations of not shooting until you see the whites of their eyes. The knives of Skiffer have become instruments of torture, and the natural world offers frightening images: a creature burrowing ever deeper into the earth, unable to turn round; a sightless pupa; a beehive where one reverts to a wingless, legless, unhatched state. As in the earlier book, the poems are minimalist, the words sparse but emphatic; the author often spaces the texts wide apart on the line rather than using punctuation. Vitöga was charac-terized by one critic as "Gregorian chant with a drum-machine accompani-ment". Despite the sombre mood there is a note of optimism; when one reaches the bottom, the sea bed "med sitt gröna sjötak" (with its green sea roof), the only way to go is up: "Här bjuds det unika tillfället / Som en luftbubbla tvingas till ytan" (A unique opportunity presents itself here / Like a bubble of air being forced to the surface).

Rachels hus (Rachel’s House, Wahlström & Widstrand, 1995) underlines the link between Ekström’s poetry and her work with other art forms, the interplay of word and image which she says is so important to her. One of its sections has texts to pictures by Peter Hahne, another is dedicated to "Ghost", the prize-winning cast of an empty house by Rachel Whiteread. One of the house poems, "Här finns minnet av en dörr" (Here is the memory of a door) translated by Ann Born, appeared in Swedish Book Review 1998:1 (p. 46).

In Fiktiva dagboken (Fictional Diary, Wahlström & Widstrand 1997), Johanna Ekström moves from poetry to short prose poems, a form which seems to suit her well. These disjointed yet aphor-istic texts vary in length from a single sentence to a couple of (small) pages. The longer format of the texts allows for a filling out of the language and imagery seen in the poems and their subject matter ranges from the prosaic to the poetic, from dream to nightmare. Themes familiar from her poetry (blood, fire, rock, precipices, identity, time) resurface here, and seemingly unhealthy preoccupations with cutting, killing and violent death are unexpectedly leavened by warmer, more comforting entries, such as the gentle account of her dead grandmother baking bread. Some of the texts purport to be childhood memories, but at other points she admits to "reconstructions" and questions whose memories or views of reality can ever be valid. One entry compares summer holiday memories to items stored in a freezer, among them raspberries, apricots, faces, fingers, a notebook. Family members — father, mother, brother — feature in many of the texts, sometimes loving but often in cold, wintry settings and/or meeting with sudden, shocking deaths that would appear to lend themselves all too neatly to psychoanalytical interpretation. It would be hardly surprising, however, if Ekström still needed to work through some complex and unresolved feelings about her relationship with her famous Swedish literary parents: her mother is the writer and translator Margareta Ekström, her father the author Per Wästberg. Relationships are a major preoccupation of the poems. What is the nature of love? Here we are offered a profusion of alternatives: is it something that frees us from the fate of isolation; that consumes and burns us; that makes us lower our defences and offer ourselves up; that gives us the urge to explode, unfurling like a peony; or that we should learn to receive calmly, retaining control?

As in most diaries, the focus is introspective and personal. There are fleeting glimpses of the outside world: some film-makers in Bosnia, for example, a bomb alert on the underground, a little factory in Naples and a reminiscing gravedigger from Dresden. One text in particular expresses the underlying paradox of the the view of life presented in Fiktiva dagboken: "Det naturliga är att det gör ont. Men meningen är att man ska klara sig." (It’s natural for it to hurt. But the intention is that you should get through.) Several of the author’s as yet unpublished prose poems have been translated into English, among them the following, which is a companion piece to the family episodes in Fiktiva dagboken:

I dream of burning books, of whole libraries burning down. I and my brother try to save them amongst fires and petrol cans. We thrust our hands into the flames and sweep the books off the shelves and hurl them out of the windows. Outside, the snow lies glittering in the moonlight. Hoar frost on the fir trees, tracks of roe deer, birdseed. We know the library will explode at any minute. Amidst the chaos of fire and smoke, our family is suddenly there. They try to take the books from us. They leaf through them, read the endpapers, judge them. They have opinions about those worth saving and those we can leave to burn. They don’t realize we are all on the verge of destruction. My brother and I wrench the books from their hands, empty the bookshelves. Throw them out into the snow, at random.

gå förlorad (Getting Lost, Wahlström & Widstrand, 1998) is Johanna Ek-ström’s most recent volume of poetry. It takes as its central theme the transience and motion of a journey, the raw and painful journey into and through a new relationship. Many critics characterized this a collection of love poems, but the tone is neither happy nor celebratory and images of death and cold, blood and wounds, isolation and loss are as insistent as ever. The title is open to multiple interpretations about what is lost along the way and about losing yourself, in the sense of abandoning yourself to another person, to love. The "I" of the poem feels at times too distant from the other person, at times unbearably close. For Ekström, the journey is paradoxical too: as we move forward, our surroundings appear to move backwards; and as we travel, we are always coming home. Some of the poems contain exotic, foreign touches, tantalizingly unexplained: a bougain-villea, flamingos, a hippopotamus, a fig tree, Indian temple offerings. The poems are again minimalist in form, but a mood, even a whole story, can be con-jured from a few lines:

"Käraste, fyll denna lilla snabelsko
med det godaste du vet.
Ja, sultanens russin!
men fyll den före morgontimman,
annars är du dödens."

"Dearest, fill this little, curl-toed shoe
with the tastiest of morsels.
Yes, the Sultan’s raisins!
But fill it before morning comes,
or know that you must die."

Johanna Ekström enjoys the visual qualities of her poetry, seeing them as complementary to her activities in other branches of the visual arts such as sculpture, photography, video, even dance. Sometimes working in collabor-ation with others, in particular with her artist and film-maker husband Erik Pauser, she likes to create thought-provoking, large-scale pieces, often emphasizing the element of risk. A child’s swing is suspended above broken glass (Gunga, Swing, 1998) for example; dancers are dressed as firefighters wreathed in smoke (Myn-ningar, Orifices, 1998); or a huge box of tempting crystallized sugar is mixed with fragments of glass (Schlaraffen-land, Land of Cockaigne, 1996). There are unmistakeable echoes of themes from her writing: pictures of her grand-mother’s hands in the suite of photographs Ingen har dött av kärlek (No-one has died of love, 1997); the mouths, tongues and other isolated body parts in various of her photographs and in an untitled installation at a Gothen-burg gallery in 1996. The vulnerability of the human form was also a central theme in Skåda (Gaze), an installation with dancers in Stockholm in 1997. One of her major projects to date was Brott (Break-Out), an installation devised with Erik Pauser in 1998. In collaboration with the choreographer Björn Elisson, this will be developed into a dance and art event in Stockholm in late 2000. Ekström and Pauser are also currently working on film manu-scripts and on a new collaborative instal-lation with the working title "What do we know about fear". Ekström’s new solo exhibition is about to open at the Charlotte Lund Gallery in Stockholm. She has also written a series of poems which have been translated into English to accompany an exhibition due to be staged at a gallery in Dublin.

The volume of short stories Vad vet jag om hållfasthet (What Do I know of Stability, Wahlström & Widstrand, 2000), is yet another new step for Johanna Ekström, this time into longer prose and, in a sense, out into the wider world. The vulnerability, alienation and disturbing violence of her poetry and prose poems is still there, but seems somehow less shocking because there is room for an element of character-ization and psychological explanation. Human relationships are once more a central theme, and female, first-person narrators predominate. Some of the stories grew out of travels to film festivals around the world, others are fruits of a recent visit to the USA, where she and her husband were interviewing Vietnam war veterans. "Explosioner", for example, is the bleak tale of Raymond, scarred by the conflict, and his dysfunctional, victimized family. "Volleyball" illuminates the conflicts of ‘normal’ family life and the unpredictability of growing old. Ekström also explores subversion of tradition and rebellion against convention. The anarchic "Bomull" tells of a Swedish girl who drunkenly upsets the genteel rituals of a male-dominated dinner at a Cambridge college. "Pretzel Mix", translated below, mischievously depicts the clash between the idealized, rather fossilized version of Swedish culture served up by diplomats and embassy staffs around the world and a newcomer’s urge to let in the diversity of the modern, cosmopolitan world. The perfect public image of the well-groomed, efficient, new female consul conceals an inner sense of insecurity and disorientation. The finished translation is the result of much discussion with the author, further proof — if any were needed — of her fervent feeling for language and the aesthetic effect of words.