Dog Star Notations

H?kan Sandell's "Dog Star Notations" is the first selection available in English from one of contemporary Sweden's finest poets. Since abandoning a university education decades ago, Sandell has resolutely gone his own way, drawing on any tradition that offered a way around the various dead-ends of Modernism and Post-Modernism. In Norway, where he has lived for nearly twenty years, he has spent much time dialoging and collaborating with the community of neo-figurative visual artists based in Oslo. The results are there to see, in the way he combines, with an ear trained on the rhetoric and verse music of Swedish baroque poetry, a painter's eye for the telling physical detail. A sometimes withering critic of contemporary society, he is also a compassionate, even reverent observer. In love with the material world, yet inspired by the mysticisms of the world's religions (great and small, orthodox and un), Hakan Sandell comes across in these poems as a kind of streetwise Theosophist, alive to beauty and cruelty everywhere, compelled to make song of both.