Release date is 2026-01-18

Tuula Temonen

Kolme by Elina Vaara, Katri Suoranta, and Katri Vala is a poetry anthology written in the early 20th century. The collection brings together three distinct lyric voices that meditate on nature’s seasons, love and desire, spiritual yearning, death and immortality, and the pull of the modern city and the cosmos. Its mood shifts from rapturous hymns and mythic visions to intimate lullabies and stark confessions of loneliness, giving readers a rich cross‑section of Finnish modernist sensibility.

The opening of Kolme presents three cycles of poems: first a sequence marked by autumnal clarity, prayers, shepherd and morning songs, and exultant odes, then a turn to fragile spring love, fear and longing, and finally a narrative of two young lovers whose fate ends in death yet promises reunion beyond time, alongside tender poems to a child and a serene “song of immortality.” The next group moves into a snowy, lamplit city and a vast cosmic longing, hymns of transcendence, parables of beauty and freedom, visions of death as voyage, and love poems that glow with spring mornings yet darken with sea‑driven yearning and lament; it culminates in awakenings, mythic play (a nymph with Pan’s flute), blue‑bright mornings, an ode to the airplane, and the ache of words that cannot contain experience. The final section opens with visionary and myth‑tinged pieces (watchers at the prow of history, Astraia, a fallen meteor, a Lermontov‑like prophet), then moves through love stories and Eastern‑colored parables, grief tempered by hope, and, in the fragment we receive, a return to a dreamt childhood home shimmering like a half‑remembered place. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: Porvoo: WSOY, 1930