Mozart's Third Brain

This ambitious, sprawling book-length poem from one of Sweden's leading lights aspires to consider almost everything: music in composition and performance, friends' illness and death, cosmology, sex, and metaphysics: “Within myself I hear the dichotomies, recurrent/ on many levels, ontologically, epistemologically Also/ emotionally.” Such abstract musings cut against Sonnevi's striking lyric interludes, as when he evokes “The whirlwind of ash at my feet, invisible/ Where shall I set them down.” Composed between 1992 and 1996, its 164 sections also react to European politics, including Sweden's vote on whether to enter the E.U. and the conflict and slaughter in Bosnia. Political economy makes an appearance, too (“The sea of finance capital, of over 7 trillion dollars,/ moving freely over the surface of the globe”). He wants, also, to see how social and artistic life and the sciences can merge and interact in his own mind, where “There's no end to analyses We stand at the beginning of everything.” Sonnevi's sentences sound admirably idiomatic in Lesser's rendering. Yet even Swedish readers (as Lesser notes) remain both fascinated and baffled by Sonnevi's informality and by his reach: for every American drawn to these long meditations, another may regard them as merely journals, a thoughtful poet's lengthy notes for an unwritten poem. (Oct.)