Hvit hare, grå hare, svart

The poems in White Hare, Grey Hare, Black cover a broad range of themes. Here are poems about mechanical devices and aids that have been of great significance to human beings – such as odes to sandpaper, hinges and a cast iron door. The collection also includes a series of poems, so-called ekphrases, about paintings from the now closed National Gallery. Finally, the book contains a sequence of poems of a more personal nature, including one about the late Scottish poet and Rimbereid’s friend, Tom Leonard.

As is so often the case in Rimbereid’s work, the various motifs and themes are twisted together in an intense and expansive way, so that, for example, the depiction of an explicitly political painting by Arne Ekeland suddenly becomes a portrait of the author’s grandmother in desperate prayer.

Nominated for the Brage Prize 2019

“White Hare, Grey Hare, Black is more loosely connected than many of Rimbereid’s earlier books, but the composition is both meaningful and effective. Throughout the collection there are sliding, leaping, bounding shifts between art and reality, between memories, history and life. Rimbereid senses, thinks, asks: He connects the inner world of man with the outer material world in a collection that shows how reality expresses and elevates itself, in works of art and crafts, and in the many quiet objects in the world.”
Statement from the jury of the Brage Prize

Praise

“In his new book, Øyvind Rimbereid creates a historical space rarely seen in poetry today.”
6 out of 6 stars, Dagbladet

“This time [Rimbereid’s] originality and seasoned mastery are in the details, in the little things, in the tone and the phrasing.”
5 out of 6 stars, Stavanger Aftenblad

“This Brage-nominated poem collection is perhaps the place to start for readers wishing to enter the world of Øyvind Rimbereid. It’s intense and exciting.“
5 out of 6 stars, Bok365

“It’s impossible not to be inspired by the rhythm and surges of Rimbereid’s poetry.”
Morgenbladet

“Øyvind Rimbereid is a stimulating lyric poet. He is both familiar and fresh with each re-reading. He doesn’t settle into any mould, but explores and expands our living world.”
NRK

“Rimbereid contemplates art and creates poetry at the highest level. [...] The poem’s narrator seeks the paintings’ limits, the faint, the outermost, ‘which are to be found in every gallery, on every wall’ – so, a human vulnerability that can be found just as much in publicly renowned art as in private photographs. The broken, cubist form in Ekeland’s painting is used to gently push the narrator’s memories into the picture, and in this way creates an abundance of meaning.”
Klassekampen

“If fleetingness and loss were light, they would scatter and burst forth in every space and crack in White Hare, Grey Hare, Black. In this collection of poems, Øyvind Rimbereid writes his way towards the everyday, and something original. He wants to return to a starting point, sketching distances between a then and a now, and the poems question what really happened there, along the way somewhere.”
Vårt Land

“Rimbereid’s precise and moving descriptions give me a new perception and understanding of this fabulous interior painting, where spring day enters the church”.
Henning Howlid Wærp on the poem “The Green Day”, Aftenposten