"'During those years when I lived a truly spiritual life, they called me sick and locked me up.' Intense forces are in play in the writings of Norwegian poet and diarist Olav H. Hauge. His Luminous Spaces is the life work of a restless mind and a troubled heart seeking insight into the spiritual, alert to the bleakness and beauties of nature, and intimate with philosophy and literature. His prose is rich, his poetry finely cut. Here is writing born of the need to know and the will to survive. Like the conch of which he wrote, his writings record the building of a soul to speak from solitude."—Marvin Bell

Luminous Spaces spans seventy years of Olav H. Hauge's poetry with over three hundred poems, a third of which have never appeared in English. It also includes a generous selection from his four thousand pages of journals, previously unpublished in translation, and an intimate forward by his widow, Bodil Cappelen.

"Ocean"

This is the ocean.
All serious,
vast and grey.
Yet just as the mind
in solitary moments
suddenly opens its
shifting reflections
to secret depths
– so the ocean, too,
one blue morning
may open itself
to sky and solitude.
Look, says the gleaming ocean,
I too have stars
and blue depths.

Olav H. Hauge (1908–1994) is one of the main poets of twentieth-century Norwegian literature.

Olav Grinde is a writer and translator whose works include Night Open: Selected Poems of Rolf Jacobsen.