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All is childhood

Norwegian title: Alt er barndom

Fredrik Hagen

I was suddenly alive. The first sentence of Fredrik Hagens second poetry collection, All is childhood (Alt er barndom), underlines the simply crazy and involuntary act of being born. First growing, like a seed, inside the body of someone else, as if the body was fertile soil. After that being pushed out, fed and tended and all that. And then, not so much later, the merciless expectation of becoming something on your own. Something about will. Something about survival. Something about warm feelings. Where did it all come from? The seed? The female soil? From the child we have all been? Fredrik Hagen´s collection is unusually rich and riveting. The writer has an open eye to the most simple conditions of live, those we do not even take for granted; I was suddenly alive. It happened in the summer.