Beinir Bergsson: Sólgarðurin. Poems. Forlagið Eksil, 2021. Nominated for the 2022 Nordic Council Literature Prize.

Sólgarðurin (‘The Sun Garden’, translated into English) by Beinir Bergsson is an epoch-making expansion of the (lyrical) literary landscape of the Faroe Islands. In this poetry collection, poetic neo-materialism is juxtaposed with youthful, unabashed sexuality and melancholy reminiscence.

In many ways, the poems are a classic story of growth – and yet not. For the poems do not seem particularly interested in leaving or escaping places, or in putting distance between the poet-self’s present and the poet-self’s past. The one does not exclude the other for Beinir: sexual desire is not at the expense of the family, the line – rather the contrary. Desire and sexuality are creative and expansive, and the reader is left with the feeling that the world has actually grown larger through this collection of poems. 

Beinir Bergsson made his debut in 2017 with the poetry collection Tann lítli drongurin og beinagrindin (‘The Little Boy and the Skeleton’, not translated into English), which portrays, inter alia, the loss of a parent, the poet-self’s father. The debut work won EBBA-virðislønin (the EBBA Award), the annual literature prize of the Faroese Writers’ Association.

In Sólgarðurin, the poet-self is now older. From being preoccupied with absence and distance, he is now preoccupied with closeness, intimacy and sexuality: specifically, between the bodies of two boys. With Sólgarðurin, Beinir has written the Faroe Islands’ first explicit collection of queer poetry, a variety of literary nature that is new to the Faroe Islands. Sólgarðurin is a new landmark, both for literature and for the men in the above extract, whom the poems foretell will need help to find their way in the future. This is why the poetry collection is so successful: The poems’ highly corporeal desires transcend themselves, touchingly manifesting a higher ideal of care between human beings.