At 15:25 on the afternoon of 22 July 2011 a 950 kg bomb was detonated in Regjeringskvartalet, the government quarter of downtown Oslo and home to the Office of the Prime Minister and the Headquarters of the Norwegian Labour Party. Eight people were killed in the blast and a further 209 were injured.

Fleeing the scene, the same perpetrator, an extreme right-wing terrorist, then drove 23 miles north to the island of Utøya where the youth wing of the Norwegian Labour Party, the AUF, were holding their summer camp. There he shot and killed 69 people on the island, most of whom were teenagers. These teenagers had come to the island to engage in political discussions and debates, in workshops, to meet with former and current members of the Storting, the Norwegian parliament, and to listen to live music as well as partake in the typical activities of any summer camp—playing football, camping under the stars, swimming and even going to an evening disco set up by the organisers. The AUF’s annual summer camp is an opportunity for young people to see how they can make a positive difference in the world around them and many go on to lives of public service themselves.

Initially many at the camp mistook the sounds of gunfire for firecrackers, only to realise, as they were met with a wall of children and adults running toward them, that this was something altogether different. There are innumerable stories of teens and adult supervisors deliberately setting off in the opposite direction, towards the sound of gunfire to try and stop whoever was responsible. Most notably among them Chechen teenagers Rustam Daudov and Jamal Movsar, who threw stones at the extreme right-wing terrorist’s head and successfully struck him in the face. Daudov is also separately credited with saving 23 lives, ushering children into the sanctuary of a cave. He was 16. Across the water from Utøya are both a set of campsites and secluded rental properties. Holidaymaker Marcel Gleffe drove his small motorboat across the water while under fire. He managed five trips, pulling struggling teenagers from the water before the police asked him to stop. He is known to have saved 25 people, but that figure is likely higher. All three men are alive today. Some of the attack’s survivors have converted their experiences into more political action, originally from Sri Lanka, Kamzy Gunaratnam dived into the water in 2011 and swam to safety. In 2015, she became Oslo’s youngest ever deputy mayor and at the time of writing has recently won a by-election and is now a member of parliament. Lisa Marie Husby’s TEDx talk on surviving Utøya and her journey after 22 July has racked up more than 20,000 views and is a potent reminder that even as the news cycles move on, the wounds remain, and it is contingent upon the survivor to make the difficulty known.

During the course of a televised trial at Oslo District Court in 2012, the perpetrator was tried and convicted of mass murder and acts of terrorism and sentenced to 21 years in prison, the equivalent of a life sentence in Norway. Following the sentencing the 22 July Commission, responsible for reviewing the police and security failures that led to the attacks said that these were, ‘the most shocking and incomprehensible acts ever experienced in Norway’ (Norges Offentlige Utredninger, 2012).

The population of Norway is about three million less than the entire population of London. Norway’s inhabitants primarily live on the peripheral, with the majority of housing around the country’s jagged coastline, in ports and inlets and bays, tucked into hillsides in close quarters. This meant that the destruction wasn’t local to Oslo and known to members of the AUF, but it affected communities across the country and deeply and resounds to this day. In her poem ‘Straff’ (‘Punishment’) Norwegian poet Cecilie Løveid described the bedtime songs no longer sung (2013: 3) just as the absence stretches beyond the front door and into classrooms with empty desks. Norwegians talk about the presence of counsellors at schools, the fact that it was the friend’s son or daughter who used to babysit for the neighbours, the cousins at Christmas who, rather than come over to exchange presents, drove to the cemetery instead and still do. The Crown Princess’s step-brother, the island’s security guard, was among the victims, shot in the back, while walking up the hill, to check the perpetrator’s fake police ID. The tragedy was felt in every corner of Norwegian society. As I talked to my co-author Endre Ruset about it, it was clear that the subject was impossible not to address in literature, it would have been like forgetting to wake up in the morning or ignoring some vital condition of living. Writing in the New York Times ‘Our task’, said the novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, is ‘to allow the weight of reality to break through the picture and correct it’.

These poems come from Deretter (‘Thereafter’) a series of elegies four and half years in the making. It was Endre Ruset who invited me to work on this book in 2017. Previously he had published a highly influential poem called ‘Prosjektil’ (‘Projectile’) which turned the attention away from the perpetrator and back to the victims. The poem is created from found material, a list of injuries suffered in Oslo and on Utøya Island that made what Endre Ruset called the most desperately saddening poetry he had ever heard, a profoundly affecting and seemingly unending litany.

Deretter itself is comprised of three movements, the first of which is ‘Saken’ (‘Matter’), a visual poem charting the change over time in the effects of PTSD on those who were caught in the blast of the Oslo bombing. In ‘Saken’ the viewer stares into the poem, a fractured window, with documented experiences scaled according to their distance in time from detonation to now, using an underlying map of the image of heat distribution throughout the universe taken by NASA’s WMAP probe. The second section is ‘Deretter’ itself, a sequence of concrete elegies that have been referred to variously as ‘face poems’ or ‘portrait poems’. These are 69 poems in the shapes of the faces of the 69 people who lost their lives on Utøya Island. In the centre of the book is ‘Prosjektil’ cutting through both the destruction of the bombing and the intimate damage of the shooting—a single projectile of truth, one long sentence in detached, anatomising language.

To be invited to work on a subject of this magnitude was something far outside anything to be reasonably asked. There is no template and no calculus for another’s sadness, worse still, it can feel very hopeless when the reasoning behind an injury is based on misinformation and easily disprovable conspiracy theory and is therefore groundless and senseless. We were both warded away from writing about the subject by writers we both respect and admire and hoped, as we wrote, beyond the more reasonable expectation of failure.

All of those questions enter your mind about being an outsider in someone else’s hurt and pain, and whether a poem would be more insulting than consoling and I did all I could to listen closely and to work respectfully. I was concerned about my own credentials. The question also entered my mind of if not you then who? If everyone feels the subject is too impossible to write about with sensitivity and care and to do the subject justice, then no-one will attempt it. Although I would have to shelve my own writing, it squared my thinking and I made my decision.

I spent several years, through the pandemic and working night shifts at a supermarket, researching on my breaks and weekends, reading everything I could about the families, the survivors, the bereaved and their journeys. I read through the eyewitness testimonies in English and Norwegian and frequently found myself sobbing at the computer, or dreaming of being in the woods in the dripping, soaking, thin summer rain, often in the Sisyphean act of pleading with ghosts. Although I have been through significant counselling to avoid the threat of secondary trauma, my night-time mind will periodically take me back to it. Working with a collaborator, both Endre with me and me for him, we were able at least to always have another person on the other end of a Whatsapp or a Zoom call when the material and our own sense of outrage, sadness, futility and frustration was at its toughest. We had to keep the project under wraps and that made the process even more isolating. As we worked, we were able to garner feedback from both survivors and casual readers and writers in Norway to get their impressions of the work. We were fortunate too, to have feedback from Heidi Williamson, who had recently authored an exceptional collection Return by Minor Road on her memories of Dunblane.

In Norway, Norwegians learn poetry from Norway (and in Norwegian dialects), Germany, France, Denmark, the UK, Ireland and the US. The support for literature nationally is taken far more seriously than it is in the UK—from the diverse range of schools of literature on the national curriculum to the subsidised support of working, professional writers. Norwegian writers see themselves as being in conversation with these international influences. Culturally, therefore, the Norwegian general reader’s taste is more contemporary, more radical and international. To my own English sensibilities, I felt that using concrete forms was pushing the limits of the general reader’s tolerances. This, however, was counterbalanced by the emphatic, dynamic re-presence that the form opens in the reader. Like an ambigram or an optical illusion, the mind is caught between states of either reading or viewing the text and becoming alert to the face while still remaining semantic rather than asemantic (‘asemic’). In other contexts where poetry operates in this space, this re-presenting state is intentional—sura, or verses, that are inscribed so beautifully that they form swirls on the interior of the dome of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul are both art and the text of the Qu’ran. They are designed to be contemplated and to evoke the sacred, the divine and metaphysical. Some of the founders of concrete poetry, the de Campos brothers, described this as using the ‘graphic space as structural agent’ (Comp & Barnstone, 1968) in a concrete poem, freeing it from strictly ‘linear-temporistical development’. In a concrete poem the reader-viewer can spend time as they would with a painting in a gallery, to gaze, to follow their own thoughts in concert with what they are observing and arrive at some new, transcendent experience of the original text. The triangular shapes of George Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’, that we associate in the UK with visual poetry are concerned with the spiritual direction of the individual, with death and resurrection as Herbert’s speaker says, ‘With thee/O let me rise’. Ancestors of both examples are found among the visual poetry of Simias of Rhodes, whose poems were designed to confer immortality from from subject to poem, and by extension, from poem to reader, like Shakespeare’s lines of, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day…’ (‘Sonnet 18’) in which the final lines say, ‘When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:/So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,/So long lives this, and this gives life to thee’. The concrete elegy as a portrait offers a state of contemplation and eternal and sacred remembrance.

If the ultimate goal is to write poetry of witness with the honest intention of recentring the lives of those who were lost and to speak to Norwegian sensibilities and to console, then surely that is very high-minded and the test of that achievement is to see what the reaction is from the public. Poesis has its roots in the Greek meaning ‘the thing made’ and as a poet that means your artwork is not simply something that can belong and act as a chronicle on its own in space in the present, but that past participle, ‘made’ it has been ‘made’ already, indicates to my mind that the poem’s destination—as well as the poet’s role—is inherently one of reflection.

When we tentatively first presented some of the poems to survivors in mid-2019, they were very moved and unprompted, they wrote some of their own poems in response to the events for the first time. The feedback that the poems were clear-eyed and didn’t shy away from the violence and that they highlighted the struggles they had been through and that are ongoing was appreciated. That was a watershed moment for both Endre and I, where we realised that the poems had worked to chronicle and reflect in some way. At the same time, while it was enormously validating, this is not a saviour narrative. No response was ever going to be perfect and will always be inherently flawed. It is not a success story therefore, but it is a human story. There have been countless news specials, television documentaries, films, plays and even semi-fictional novels written about the attacks. People who lived this reality, along with the difficulties they have to endure because of it, must have the option to live with privacy. Survivors today talk about an ever-changing parade of fears, of anyone wearing a police uniform, simple things like someone dropping a car bonnet shut for example, others fear any physical contact, the sudden, irrupting panic attacks at home and in public—that can be in the park or on the tram, or anywhere, flashbacks, insomnia, suicidal thoughts and deep depression. These all have a very steep impact on their relationships personally and professionally. In his essay, ‘Blood and Brexit’ in the New York Review, the poet Nick Laird (2019) spoke of the generational effects the Troubles continue to have long after in Northern Ireland with ‘high rates of abuse of all kinds, and addiction to drugs and alcohol … the use of antidepressants (at almost three times, say, the rate of England)’. In this situation, survivors find it very hard to know where to turn or how to ask for help and that can be even more ostracising. When a new artistic response emerges, the right to privacy and the right to engage or to leave the work behind is entirely and rightfully at the discretion of those directly affected. With this in mind, survivors and the bereaved highlighted to us that removing names from the portraits would be a supportive step. Many had received death threats in part through the publicising of the perpetrator’s motivations. While congratulatory and pleased at the arresting nature of the poems, they also raised concerns that biographical details in the poems might be identifying in a similar vein. Based on this feedback, we swapped out details and re-worked the poems, creating more of a collage of lived experiences. It is also illustrative of the human story—implicitly any artwork about an atrocity—has to be a work of two faiths; first your empathy and fidelity around the experiences of your subject and secondly the respect for the artistic telos or aim of artwork itself. This is the difference between having teenage actors with American accents jumping from cabin windows on the one hand, and on the other, asking parents to talk to camera in Norwegian and at their own pace about how it is now and what they wish people knew about their children.

A poem is atomically—that is to say indivisibly—as well as inescapably a communicative art rather than a therapeutic tool though it can be used effectively in that context. Maritain (quoted by Eliot for a similar purpose) said, ‘it is a deadly error to expect poetry to provide the super-substantial nourishment of man’ (Maritain, 2016). Similar to the rhyme on a tea towel or a fridge magnet, the earnestness of a poem endangers its ability to challenge and actively engage the imagination of the reader. It will endeavour to explain rather than chronicle, instruct rather than reflect and as such it can escape the reader, unchanged or act as a kind of rhyming summary and confirmation of the known. But poetry that tells the truth will often do so by devious means. It will change form to become part of the orchestra in the symphony of their own thinking. As Atwood said, the poem, ‘must be brought back into the land of the living and allowed to enter time once more—which means … the realm of readers, the realm of change’ (2003). It is this change that we wanted to inspire.

With ‘The green tent…’ the original poem was written in Norwegian. Throughout the book we had been writing poems separately, but using one another’s work as both call and response, picking up on vocabulary, themes and ideas. Like the Labour Party in the UK, the Norwegian Labour Party also uses the rose as its primary symbol. This took on new meaning, when in the aftermath of the attacks huge crowds gathered to mourn outside Oslo District Court, holding roses. In Ruset’s poem, he repeats the word ‘forvandlet’ meaning to ‘transform’ or ‘convert’. In English both have an aspect of ongoing mutability; a chest of drawers can be ‘transformed’ by a bold choice of colour, or a barn ‘converted’, though the physical dimensions of both might remain unaltered. The etymology of ‘forvandlet’ in Norwegian shares the English word ‘for’ with the Greek and which means ‘one’ or ‘man’—so together this makes a kind of for-one-ing. Single or multiple things are ‘changed’ immutably into this one thing. Working closely with Endre Ruset, I inserted the adverb ‘forever’, keeping the labio-dental fricative sounds of ‘f’ and ‘v’ through the word ‘forever’ as well as preserving his desire to painfully echo responses to the events. In ‘The green tent…’ we see the campsite on Utøya island and the stillness of it, the deflated football, the hair elastic and the fire pit, in the aftermath before we then cross the water, to shift our attention to ‘the decade of sleep’ to the bombed out front of the Labour Party Headquarters where the roses climb ‘floor by floor’ up the windows.

‘Inside the car…’ had its origins in a Ted Hughes poem called ‘The Amulet’ (Hughes & Keegan, 2005). In the poem Hughes makes a list of the characteristics of the wolf to detect and to know the world around it. The poem has a circular structure, like the mise en abîme in which a person holds a portrait of themselves holding a portrait of themselves holding a portrait of themselves, smaller and smaller ad infinitum. In Hughes’ ‘The Amulet’ the poem uses a similar technique, the wolf’s attributes are compared to heather on a mountain, to a ragged forest and a stony horizon, all of which are contained within the North Star, which is itself like the wolf’s fang which is like the heather on a mountain. This circular narrative encompasses and contains the poem like a cure or a charm. It is Hughes at his most animist and shamanic. I wanted a poem that could have the effect of this charm to untie the reader from conventional linear time and to start thinking of grief more for what it is: unpredictable, primal and capricious. In previous years, the Kübler-Ross model of grief described five distinct stages of grief, but we now know this to be outmoded and outdated—grief is a journey without any recognisable landmarks. Just as the unpredictable powers of the wolf are contained and handed to the reader under tightly controlled conditions and strict instructions, where they can be safely examined, so too, grief can be temporarily contained and examined. This might be through the carefully chosen words of police and priests and the circle of a person’s own experience, the circle of group therapy, the circuit of a snow-ridden park and the circle of a coffee mug which all act as containers for powerful and charged feelings. During a consultation in 2013 with the public about a memorial at Hole, members of the 22 July National Support Group were asked to come up with single words that they associated with the 22 July. These included ‘ettertanke’ (‘contemplation’ literally ‘afterthought’) and ‘fortsetter’ (‘continuing’ or ‘ongoing’ (Hjorth & Giermshusengen, 2018)).

When we cut ourselves, we heal, if we have a cold, we recover and we might infer from this that we can be just as easily healed when we experience grief. The old adage ‘time heals all wounds’ comes to mind. This was coined long before what we know now, which is that, we learn to live better with the grief we have, but there is no finite ending. The sum we were before, minus the person we’ve lost no longer adds up to the same person we were before. We have to find a new way to solve ourselves and who we are now. Grieving is both an extension of our love for that person when they were alive and the means by which we honour them. We can intellectually process this idea, but our emotions feel more like the time traveller caught between two times—the time in the past when the person we loved was alive and incomprehensibly, the time now where they are just a memory. Painfully and frequently it seems we also possess the ability to forget which time we are in (especially in our dream-life). Psychotherapist and author on grief, Julia Samuel, described this aspect of grief as having ‘its own momentum’ (2018). We swing in and out of different times and emotions and associations.

In 2013 Simon Shimson Rubin co-authored a seminal book on working with the bereaved that outlined a two-track approach—to address (i) the connection to the person we have lost, and (ii) how, in grief, we will continue to function in society. It is in this context that the contemporary elegy might retire some of its traditions and be renewed in line with modern understanding. Traditional English elegy tends to be filled with hyperbole and classical imagery. In poems like Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ or Shelley’s ‘Adonais’ or even in Tennyson and Auden, we want to resurrect the dead in some more comprehensible arcadian vision, to divorce the mind from a more gruelling, purely felt and upsetting reality. In the poem ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’ by Seamus Heaney, he describes anointing the body of his cousin with dew. Later in his career, he wrote about his concern that he may have made the scene too precious in Station Island, and ‘confused evasion and artistic tact … whitewashed ugliness’ (1984) rather than speaking more of what it meant.

In the poem ‘Vertigo’ I was looking for clear, pathological language. I read through various medical encyclopaedias and dictionaries and looked up anything I could find that contained the word ‘loss’ in the definition and cross-referenced these with my research into some of the symptoms prevalent among those with PTSD and more specifically those recovering after the attacks in Oslo and on Utøya. I wanted to write a kind of dictionary of survivors’ experiences to show how they fell between the cracks of a simple pathology. In the bombing the perpetrator had added shrapnel to the bomb to inflict the maximum amount of bodily harm, similarly on Utøya the perpetrator used modified bullets and a great number of the injured still live with metal from either ricocheted bullets or blast material in their bodies. Similar to the previous poem, dictionaries have no narrative and no chronology, they also, strikingly, had no definition for ‘grief’ or ‘love’. Quite a few of the descriptions in the court documents and in particular in the indictment of the perpetrator describe how a person is treated in situ and thereafter transferred to a hospital, or following treatment, thereafter, is discharged home (Oslo District Court, 2012). The word they use over and over in each description is also how we arrived at the title for the book, ‘deretter’. In many senses, part of the afterlives of each of the victims takes place in the imagination of the reader and, in good faith, offers solace, as well as hope in that solace as much as it offers an opportunity for reflection and contemplation.

HM 05.07.23

Deretter is published by Flamme forlag in Norway and a selection of the poems in English, Utøya Thereafter is published by Hercules Editions.