The statement "Det er noe vi har glemt" (There is something we have forgotten) runs like a subtext through several of Rolf Jacobsen's poems. He maintains that people have lost their sense of calm, and that a certain unity has also been lost. Reflecting on old place-names in the poem "Hundvåko" (Hundvåko) in the collection Tenk på noe annet (Think about Something Else, 1979), he says, "Det må ha bodd noen her før / som var mere kjente her enn vi er blitt" (People must have lived here before / who were more familiar with the place than we are). The names no longer correspond to anything within people; something has been broken and cannot be mended. This fundamental divide between then and now is a typical modernist theme. To have forgotten something may mean not only that one has lost one's perception of wholeness but also that in one's day-to-day, automatic actions one neglects the concrete and the sensual--a kind of "forgetting of being." In his poetry Jacobsen does not seek to heal the former sort of break--the new situation is irrevocable, he thinks--but he does often try to expand his readers' perception of the world.
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