Literature and Fiction · Hardback

A bit like that song

Norwegian title: Litt som den sangen

Håvard J. Nilsen

Håvard J. Nilsens debut A bit like that song orbits around a group of students, and within the group: a couple. Book titles, authors, political and historical references bounce from wall to wall inside the student collective, and the poems make it obvious how we once understood and explained our young lives through new knowledge and learning. We all do that, don´t we? The way a new film, book, song and so on would be able to catch the essence of us, finally understanding it, and how an obscure theoretic would make the world understandable for us for a couple of days, maybe a week. Before something new, even more obscure, would push us in a new direction.

We who watched the towers fall and the tanks roll into Bagdad and "mission accomplished" going from Netscape to Chrome and from Wimp to iTunes and from Clinton to Bush & Bin Laden

who heard the first Coldplay record in a coffee-shop in Trondheim and discovered Pineapple Thief by coincidence while Mosjøen laid grey and sad outside

Håvard J. Nilsen writes poems about soon to be parted people in soon to be vacated apartments. Poems about the great self-sufficient world that wraps up tiny human lives, where everything is shared, striking from Bagdad to Mosjøen with the greatest obviousness, trying, like all grown up students do, to capture that old feeling that anything is possible, just one last time. A bit like that song that we would listen to all night. Remember?