Øyvind Rimbereid

Øyvind Rimbereid Poems

Øyvind Rimbereid Biography

Øyvind Rimbereid was born in Stavanger in 1966 and is living in Bergen today. He is one of Norway’s most significant contemporary poets.. In 1994 he graduated as cand.philol in literature from the University of Bergen. He is an assistant lecturer at the Skrivekunstakademiet i Hordaland writing academy. His debut work, a collection of short stories entitled Det har begynt, was published in 1993. Since 2000, he has been writing mainly poetry. His long poems, in which he initiates profound discussions on social, historical, political and economic themes, have attracted particular interest. Four volumes of poetry have appeared to date. The most significant of these is Solaris korrigert (2004), which includes the science fiction long poem of the same name, for which he won, among other awards, the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature, and which as early as 2007 became part of the canon of Norwegian literature. Most recently, in the poem Tulipan. Mani, he envisages the collapse of the financial markets. The poem was published just as his predictions became reality. The poem appeared in the volume Herbarium (2008), for which Øyvind Rimbereid was nominated for the 2009 Nordic Council’s Literature Prize.)

The Best Poem Of Øyvind Rimbereid

The Treasure Chamber In Braga

Also on the way up the stairs
to Arte Sacra we could hear
the scream two blocks behind us,
where she sat, her hands on the wheel.
A collision! I thought first,
before I saw the car
parked, perfectly fine
while she herself was just screaming
and people were stopping. An elderly woman
pulled on the door, shouted, to no avail,
finally putting her arms over the roof
a kind of comfort through the body of the car.
While we kept walking
into the Portuguese Archbishop's
treasure chamber, gift collection,
the largest of its kind, collected at random.
Wandered around for a while
in the half-darkness, damp smell, among the objects given as gifts
or amends. Cloaks
with threads of gold, sceptres of silver,
the coloured tapestries, pictures of saints, the jewellery.
And the lesser gifts, the ashtrays
in porcelain or plastic
which could be found there
together with the first cross
put in the earth in Brazil, in the year 1500
two slender sticks of rusty iron.

Translation: May-Brit Akerholt

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