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Inger Christensen, 1935-2009 was one of Denmark's best known poets. Her poetry reflects a complex philosophical background, yet it has enjoyed wide public popularity. Many of her poems have a visionary quality, yet she is a paradoxically down to earth visionary, focusing on the simple stuff of everyday life and in it discovering the metaphysical, as if by chance in alphabet, Christensen creates a framework of psalm like forms that unfold like expanding universes, crystallising into words both the beauty and the potential for destruction that permeate our world and our times.
In this collection, she has created a system by combining the alphabet with Fibonnaci's numeric sequence, in which each number is equal to the sum of the two preceding numbers: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc. alphabet is about the relationship between people and nature and, like it, is itself a form of creation. With the word exist as the pivot, the poems move from the first wondering confirmation, apricot trees exist out into the world to life and death, the planet and calamity.
A book originally written in Danish that I’d recommend to English-language readers
That would have to be Inger Christensen’s Alphabet. It must have been hard to translate, but it does exist in English. It is just great poetry – asking you to open your intellect as well as your senses and imagination. FROM INTERVIEW WITH SOLVEJ BALLE, Author of On the Calculation of Volume I, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025.
Inger Christensen, 1935-2009 was one of Denmark's best known poets. Her poetry reflects a complex philosophical background, yet it has enjoyed wide public popularity. Many of her poems have a visionary quality, yet she is a paradoxically down to earth visionary, focusing on the simple stuff of everyday life and in it discovering the metaphysical, as if by chance in alphabet, Christensen creates a framework of psalm like forms that unfold like expanding universes, crystallising into words both the beauty and the potential for destruction that permeate our world and our times.
In this collection, she has created a system by combining the alphabet with Fibonnaci's numeric sequence, in which each number is equal to the sum of the two preceding numbers: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc. alphabet is about the relationship between people and nature and, like it, is itself a form of creation. With the word exist as the pivot, the poems move from the first wondering confirmation, apricot trees exist out into the world to life and death, the planet and calamity.
A book originally written in Danish that I’d recommend to English-language readers
That would have to be Inger Christensen’s Alphabet. It must have been hard to translate, but it does exist in English. It is just great poetry – asking you to open your intellect as well as your senses and imagination. FROM INTERVIEW WITH SOLVEJ BALLE, Author of On the Calculation of Volume I, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025.
