Selected Poems by Knut Odegard is a long-overdue opportunity for English language readers to survey a representative selection of poems by one of the finest contemporary Norwegian poets. Described as a poet who is "intensely aware of the sacred, yet who] visits the darkest and often the most shocking corners in his determination to sanctify those places" (Kenneth Steven, Modern Poetry in Translation), Odegard draws on both the illuminating short lyric and the significantly longer meditation or sequence (often working in parallel to the liturgy of the Catholic Church) to blur the line between...