Release date is 2026-02-20

Tuula Temonen and Tapio Riikonen

Landet som icke är by Edith Södergran is a posthumous collection of lyric poetry written in the early 20th century. The book traces an intense inner quest through illness, longing, and metaphysical desire toward a visionary elsewhere beyond ordinary life.

Across four sections, the poems shift from concentrated nature scenes and intimate confessions to mythic personae and stark spiritual visions. Early pieces evoke summer hills, roses, fevered nights, troubled love, and dialogues with Eros; a dramatic exchange between a girl and a nun weighs vengeance against mercy. The middle poems present the artist’s proud mask, dawn-calls to distant worlds, and declarations of captivity, fate, and iron will. Later, the voice returns to childhood trees, a graveyard vision, a homecoming to forests and water, and the moon’s cold dominion, with brief prayers that place all time in God’s hands. The collection resolves in the longing for “the land that is not,” where chains fall and desire is answered, and finally in a calm approach to Hades’ shore—death reframed as passage toward the long-sought country of rest. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: Helsingfors: Holger Schildts Förlag, 1925