Luminous Spaces, Olav H. Hauge

Omtale

“During those years when I lived a truly spiritual life, they called me sick and locked me up.’ Intense forces are in play in the writings of Norwegian poet and diarist Olav H. Hauge. His Luminous Spaces is the life work of a restless mind and a troubled heart seeking insight into the spiritual, alert to the bleakness and beauties of nature, and intimate with philosophy and literature. His prose is rich, his poetry finely cut. Here is writing born of the need to know and the will to survive. Like the conch of which he wrote, his writings record the building of a soul to speak from solitude.” – Marvin Bell

“Who else would write a poem about his own shadow and how much it wants to be like him and ending with: ‘I myself am the shadow of another.’ Only someone steeped in kind of solitude and aloneness that Olav Hauge knew could make the mystery of this last line into an extraordinary thing.” – David Budbill

Luminous Spaces spans seventy years of Olav H. Hauge’s poetry with over three hundred poems, a third of which have never appeared in English. It also includes a generous selection from his four thousand pages of journals, previously unpublished in translation, and an intimate forward by his widow, Bodil Cappelen.

Olav H. Hauge (1908-1994) lived nearly all of his life in his native Ulvik in Western Norway. His poetry is considered to be one of the main achievements of twentieth-century Norwegian literature.