Bøker av Inger Christensen

Inger Christensen, often cited as a Nobel contender, is one of Europe's most revered poets. Winner of the Nordic Prize of the Swedish Academy and the Austrian State Prize for Literature, she is perhaps best known for her groundbreaking work Det (It), a cycle of poems published in 1969. Her first book published in the U.S., alphabet (New Directions, 2001), met with a tremendous response: "Seductive," said Boston Review; "A visionary reincarnation of the natural world in the atomic age," wrote Chicago Review. Butterfly Valley: A Requiem collects four medium-length works, each startling for its beauty and formal innovation. "Butterfly Valley" is a sonnet cycle which describes the glowing color and beauty of butterflies, and also their fragility and mortality. Memory is uncovered in the poem like the fluttering of their wings. In "Watersteps," the fountains and piazzas of Rome coalesce, brought alive in the imagination by the poem's shifting rhythms, lines, and overall structure. In "Poem on Death" the poet seeking immortality faces the whiteness of the page as the blankness of death: "it feels so odd! immodest to think / about death when no one / you know has died / it means that each time / you look at yourself in the mirror / you look death in the eye / without crying / like a clear and fully! comprehensible answer / but to questions / you dare not ask." "Meeting," written in extended sections, describes a "coming together," yet examines our failure to connect and the ability of language to overcome this.

The Dedalus Press series of budget pamphlets presents works by major voices in world poetry. Inger Christensen (1935 - 2009) was one of Denmark's best-known poets and was widely celebrated throughout Europe and the United States. She wrote several volumes of poetry as well as novels, plays, children's books and essays, winning many major European prizes and awards, including the prestigious Nordic Prize in 1994. Butterfly Valley is a tour de force, exploring the major themes of life, love, death and art. The form is simple yet complex, a sequence of fifteen sonnets building to a final sonnet of extraordinary power composed of lines taken from the preceding fourteen sonnets in the sequence. Life, love, art, all are transient - like the butterfly - yet beautiful, even in their ephemerality. The translator Susanna Nied is a former insructor of English and comparative literature at San Diego State University in California. Her translation of Inger Christensen's alphabet won the 1982 ASF/PEN Translation Prize.

Light, Grass, and Letter in April is the first book in English to appear since the great Danish poet's death in January 2009. Light (1962) and Grass (1963), her first published works, introduce her genius for the music of everyday speech, and her approaches to the themes she'd pursue throughout her life: the primacy of nature, the enigmatic boundaries between the self and the other, and the role of language as a mediator between human experience and reality. Letter in April (1979), Christensen's most intimate book, examines love and loss, self and loss of self, echoing musical structures developed by the French composer Olivier Messiaen. It was written in collaboration with the Danish artist Johanne Foss, whose accompanying drawings helped to catalyze the poems.

Awarded the American-Scandinavian PEN Translation Prize by Michael Hamburger, Susanna Nied's translation of alphabet introduces Inger Christensen's poetry to US readers for the first time. Born in 1935, Inger Christensen is Denmark's best known poet. Her award-winning alphabet is based structurally on Fibonacci's sequence (a mathematical sequence in which each number is the sum of the two previous numbers), in combination with the alphabet. The gorgeous poetry herein reflects a complex philosophical background, yet has a visionary quality, discovering the metaphysical in the simple stuff of everyday life. In alphabet, Christensen creates a framework of psalm-like forms that unfold like expanding universes, while crystallizing both the beauty and the potential for destruction that permeate our times.