AshehougAgency

In Crow Circle

Praise for In Crow Circle:

”Crows are alright. “Crow-poet” of the year Kjartan Hatløy delivers an original poetic defence for the bird with the frayed reputation.

There is something wise, something magnificent and superior about Hatløy’s crows. Not only do they live in and with the changes of nature and the elements. They are also fellow creators, they mark, shape and transform the instant and situational and makes it into something incomprehensibly universal, something we can learn from by relating to them. In Hatløy’s symbol-saturated and association-rich poetic line they become a sort of naturally endowed virtuosos of life, and it is particularly in their deep relation to the darkness in existence, to the night, the blackness and the shadows that they appear as kind of guides.
The crows don’t discriminate; they don’t separate into favourable and non-favourable. Rather, they take our contradicting conditions of life for granted and give them a free and innovative expression… He has integrity and courage to finish the project nicely. The result is a style-confident, playful and abundant collection of poetry”
(VG)

”As it often goes with good poetry, I feel strange and disoriented at first encounter. But after several times of reading my attention goes in two directions: These are the crows the way I’m used to seeing them…And these are the crows as I have never seen them before. Perhaps as they see me? Or the way the poet sees us, exposed to destructive forces that we neither overlook nor defeat other than through reproduction, which gets the last word when the “Caaaaaaaw Caaaaaaaaaw” of the crow blends with that of the infant’s in the last poem of Hatløy’s crow circle”
(Klassekampen)

First published: 2006, Forlaget Oktober
Kjartan Hatløy: Biography and bibliography