I don't really remember whether I've mentioned it here or not, but I wrote a foreword to a reprint a small publisher working in Turku, Savukeidas, did a month back. It's
Kaarlo Uskela's Pillastunut runohepo (
The Crazed-Up Pegasos, if you will) from 1921. The book was deemed revolutionary (which it is, very much indeed) and the remaining copies of the print run were destroyed. I believe also some of the copies already sold to customers were taken away and burned - the book is really scarce. I don't believe it for a minute, but let it be said that a book antiquarian I know told me that the book, if it can be found, would cost 1,000 euros.
Well, here it is anyway. The book is not mine, I'm sorry to say, but it is
almost mine, since it belongs to a dear friend of mine with whom I've been swapping books for two decades now. He borrowed the book for me when I was writing the foreword (which actually became an afterword in the process). Savukeidas made a pictureless cover for the book, because they didn't know I had the book with the illustrated cover - more's the pity! The cover is done by the famous
Ola Fogelberg, who's best known for his Pekka Puupää comics here in Finland. The colours show anarchistic ideology: black and red.
Should you want to know more about Uskela's poems (which are pretty old-fashioned and metric, but show some flair for bad taste and black humour), ask. I'll be writing more about this stuff at my Finnish-speaking blog, Julkaisemattomia,
here. But not now. Suffice it to say that Kaarlo Uskela died in 1922, after having refused to have a rotten tooth taken care of. And that after the Civil War he was put in a concentration camp for some months in 1919. There are some really touching poems about this in the book.
