by Lars U. Ice Bedew

photo c/o Henrik Montgomery, TT News Agency

Influenced by the Irish playwright Beckett, in his scope,

his plays are bleak, impersonal, and minimal in hope.

From “Raut, svart” to the doppelgängers in “…Septology…”

his novel on Lars Herterveg explores psychology,

where he observes two crossing lines, one purple and one brown,

slow painted, thick, they mix and drip—not how art should be done?

Yet of the things that are most striking of Jon Fosse’s work

is that the prose and poetry are written in Nynorsk;

in short terse sentences he gave “voice to th’ unsayable”,

like a Norse Hemingway’s words, earnest and conveyable.

***

(“Lars U. Ice Bedew” is an anagram pseudonym for poet Bruce Dale Wise.)