["Wine, Writing" is Haavikko's tenth volume of poetry.] Wine is life, and so are women and bread. Drinking, eating, Eros—all are of the same category. They give the taste of life. The glass is shaped like a woman; wine is god too. Haavikko writes of "the man who eats and drinks his god, in little pieces, as bread and as wine." And writing is drinking, wine the writer: "Wine writes better than me, it's true/in the bottle lives a savage spirit."

Life and death are inextricably interwoven. Death is a tyrant to beware of "when death begins to seem safe, gentle,/trustworthy." Life and death are represented by elemental things, the wind, grass, leaves, trees. Like the trees, the writer too must die, "this wise, cunning, false/and stupid man." Also tyrants are the "well-meaning bureaucrats, the exploiters," who take what the writer earns.

The words...