Imprinted Life discussion

Selected Poems by Jaan Kaplinski

In Kaplinski's essay 'Memories and Reflections', he eschews confining self-definitions, favoring something more like the wind's freedom and Buddhism, "The freedom of somebody who loves to observe and to photograph floating clouds and little fish swimming in our pond." Beginning in childhood, he felt in tune with Buddhist practices and philosophy.

As the book's title suggests, the scope of this poetry collection culls poems from his published books, tacking some English-written poems on. He questions pat, incurious clichéd beliefs and aphorisms about society and about objects before him, breaking the boundaries of self-centeredness and of the present time and place.

"how long can we stand here, how long
believing life is beautiful,
that everyone gets his due, that work makes us free?" (27)

"But a man is only a ship anchored in himself, in his history, his time, a big ship decaying on the village pond
forgetting there are other beings, other societies and worlds..."(35)

The poet opens the self, as the seed its case, not to the shadowy world of abstractions but to the basic truths of existence.

"...nothing at all is exotic in itself.
There is no difference between digging potatoes in our Mutiku garden
and sugar-cane harvesting in Viti Levu." (95)

"...as always,
we have more works than days and something
is always left unharvested, unpicked, unfinished." (96)

On Kaplinski's website, you might find some interesting stuff.

Transitional life of evolution in the big picture links the passage of time. In one homespun instance, he describes the changes in "an old grey tea-towel"

"where in the rain, snow and sun
it slowly rotted, moved from the man-made world back into nature
and in the spring, when we tried to wipe our hands on it
it fell into shreds on the sprouting grass." (109)

The poet desires to "grasp" the exterior world in the detritus of its "dust", to understand the palimpsest of

"We are variations on a theme which first sounded in some primal fluid, the theme life, life..." (127)

in the layers of dust. Besides the "boundless" cosmos, the tangible things and sensible ideas he prefers over impractical abstractions, the out-there natural objects of observed flora and the in-there mechanization of the body's clockwork over amorphous subjectivity. He regrets the dearth of created beauty because the creators of beauty dwindled down to an

"...impossibly few people
who are able to make anything really beautiful, and there are ever fewer of them." (127)

They created Finland's The Kalevala, Mesopotamia's Epic of Gilgamesh, Mozart's music, Norbert Wiener's cybernetics, the knitted glove patterns of Estonia's Muhu Island, and the vocal music of the Chukchi in the Bering Strait.