An Act of Resistance

In the foreword to Utøya Thereafter, the Norwegian poet Endre Ruset explains that he was already experiencing a personal loss when the tragedy occurred at Utøya Island. When the names of the victims were read out on television, it sounded incantatory, like poetry, and so Ruset began writing. Once the English poet Harry Man had joined Ruset in this project, and they were viewing the memorial gallery at Utøya, Man came up with the idea of the pattern-poems, poems shaped after photo-portraits of the victims. It is of these that the collection, based on interviews and recollections from the survivors and of the families’ grief, primarily consists.

One of the poems that reflects most directly what happened on the island that 22 July reads: ‘She was in between the information building and the pier. She was outside the main entrance to the café building’, listing places where victims were when shot. However, what the face-form adds is more intensity to the anaphora. The repeated ‘she was’ is isolated twice, positioned in the centre making up the eyes and mouth of the girl. This emphasises past tense, that she has ceased to exist. Another poem reads: ‘You write poems to console. A door that shuts out the rain before it. It doesn’t help. No’. The ‘No’ is part of the word ‘Nothing’, which breaks and continues on the other side of the face. ‘The face does’ disrupts the word ‘doesn’t’, belonging to ‘doesn’t go away’. Poetry can’t ...