alphabet

By Inger Christensen

Inger Christensen (1935-2009) was both a virtuoso and a paradox. Her fiction, drama, essays and children’s books won her wide acclaim in Denmark and other European countries, but it is her poetry – spanning a forty-year period – that best reveals her versatility and depth. Her poetry reflects a complex philosophical background, yet her most complex poetic works have 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.

‘The ecological crisis forms the starting point for a part ecstatic homage to the world and nature, which in spite of everything is still found: partly in the active sense that it exists, partly in the passive sense that it is discovered and understood – by the poet and by us.’ – Erik Skyum-Nielsen

‘Inger Christensen’s use of systems in no way inhibits the evolution of her poetry. On the contrary, it is as if the poetry comes about by virtue of the systems; as if it emerges in the interplay and friction with a random, but fixed order. In alphabet, Inger Christensen has created a system by combining the alphabet with Fibonacci’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.’ – Christian Egesholm

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Mar 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781780370064

Inger Christensen

Inger Christensen (1935-2009) was one of Denmark’s most distinguished writers, and one of Scandinavia’s most powerful literary voices. Her work earned not only critical respect but unusually exuberant public acclaim (‘Make Her Prime Minister!’ urged one reviewer). Her ingeniously crafted poetry and prose have been variously labelled as naturalist, experimental, formalist and structuralist, but her work defies labels. Each of her volumes resembles nothing else, including her own other volumes. Yet each is imbued with her characteristic visionary clarity and deep human sensibility. Christensen won numerous major European literary awards, including the Grand Prix des Biennales Internationales de Poésie, the Nordic Prize of the Swedish Academy, and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. During her final decade she was consistently mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in the small Danish town of Vejle, she lived most in Copenhagen for most of her adult life, thriving on its liveliness, but she once said that if she had not spent her childhood exploring rural Vejle’s forests, fields and fjord, she doubted that she could have written poetry. She had a formidable intellect, fluent in four languages and knowledgeable about such diverse areas as art history, quantum mechanics, mathematics, semiotics, natural history and music theory. At the same time, she was by nature eminently down-to-earth. After winning one prestigious literary prize, she hung the honorary laurel wreath in her kitchen, gradually using up its leaves in soups and stews. Christensen edited avant-garde literary journals, collaborated with musicians and visual artists, and was a lifelong advocate for political and social change. Her work has been translated into over 30 languages.

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Reviews for alphabet

[ellegato · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This collection is absolutely beautiful, breathtaking, terrifying, sad & hopeful...so many things at once. The narrative impact of the mathematical structure is so intense & perfectly suited to a book concerned with nature and the danger posed to it by humanity. This book is filled with Cold War/nuclear-age anxiety as well as a quiet, lovely reverence for the simple existence of natural things. The contrast between death and existence, between death as natural and death as human-created finality is so well portrayed throughout.

Definitely a wonderful, gorgeous work of both poetry and translation.

[saresmoore · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I read this in brief segments over the course of a few months. The genius of this work can be found not only in the mathematically inspired composition, but in Nied's brilliant translation. Christensen used the Fibonacci sequence to inspire the structure of the poems, but there is a poignant richness brought by the words themselves to the themes of environment, nature, progress, humanity in the midst of metaphysical simplicity. I think this is the most I've ever enjoyed a book of poetry.