Release date is 2026-02-14

Tuula Temonen and Tapio Riikonen

Dikter by Edith Södergran is a collection of lyric poetry written in the early 20th century. The book centers on a modern, visionary voice meditating on identity, womanhood, nature, love, spirituality, and death.

Across vivid, concentrated poems, a first‑person speaker moves through seas, forests, stars, and autumnal light, feeling both exile and fierce self-assertion. She proclaims a new female self, questions God, weighs happiness against pain, and treats death as life’s intimate sister. Scenes and symbols recur: a light in a window for the dead, stars shattering into garden “shards,” a caged bird longing for mountain silence, an autumn’s last flower, and divergent paths toward purity or ruin. Love appears intoxicating yet perilous; beauty is excess and austerity at once; foreign lands beckon, and the soul waits by still waters. The collection ultimately frames life as a tight, unyielding circle, where happiness proves hollow and pain becomes the stern giver of truth and transformation. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: Borgå: Holger Schildts Förlag, 1916