Scandinavian Literature

A unique collection of Peter Poulsen's best poems on the occasion of his 80th birthday. 99 digte af Peter Poulsen contains both the society-reproving, the jazzy, the strange and the beautiful poems from the hand of Peter Poulsen. Morten Søndergaard and Thomas Boberg have selected the poems and describe the collection in the book's foreword as follows: 'There is music, there is white wine, there is humor and there is a special Poulsen style of voice and cadence. It is a long life that is captured here in a concentrated drop from the sea of poetry that Peter Poulsen has written over time' (publisher's description, translated).

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.

Benny Andersen, currently Denmark's most popular poet, is virtually unknown in the United States. He is a poet of remarkable versatility, whose voices range from reflective to whimsical. His imagery is original and often surprising; his humor is delightful. To introduce Benny Andersen to English readers, Alexander Taylor has worked with the poet, selecting and translating poems from the eight books now available in Danish. The poems are presented here in their Danish versions and in English translations that capture the spontaneity and excitement of the originals. In both versions the poetry is evocative and refreshingly direct. The imagery is vivid, and the poet's inventive use of diction and syntax creates startling effects. Perhaps most characteristic of Andersen's work is the fusion of complex, often conflicting emotions within a single poem. Born in Copenhagen in 1929, Benny Andersen published his first book of poetry in 1960, to immediate public and critical acclaim. In addition to poetry, he has written a novel, short stories, children's books, filmscripts, television plays, and essays. He has received several awards. Originally published in 1976.

One of the best-selling poetry collections of the past decade, Asta Olivia Nordenhof's the easiness and the loneliness took Denmark by storm with its refreshing honesty and directness about growing up in a challenging family situation. Nordenhof eschews traditional ideas of poetic beauty in favour of poems that double as social critiques, addressing the inequalities in Denmark, the difficulties of living under great financial strain, various forms of abuse, and working in a brothel.

Translated from the Danish by Christopher Sand-Iversen. What, or who, is The Field? Martin Glaz Serup calls it "everybody's autobiography" and Joanna Drucker calls it a "cosmology of banalities." Cia Rinne says it "could be any average person living in a western society," while Dmitry Golynko says "maybe the field equals the inner mapping of human psychic activity." The Field is place and character, poem and contemporary novel. The book's text was originally installed in art galleries in Copenhagen and Los Angeles. First released in 2010 in book form, the original Danish title—Marken—quickly sold out of its first printing, and Finnish and Swedish translations are forthcoming. Is The Field on its way to becoming an international phenomenon? The Field is, after all, the perfect space and persona for readers' self projections, old and new. This is the English-translation of The Field, perfectly bound in book form. This is The Field and it's all about you.

Forty-One Objects by the Danish poet Carsten René Nielsen, translated by David Keplinger, is one of those books that fills your poetry heart with pure poetry joy. [...] With many poets, good and the other kind, the reader often feels the lines and/or subject is one the reader already knows or expects. Nielsen doesn't row that way. […] Poets like Nielsen give "Today's book of poetry" optimism, hope. Certain people just know how to burn, they are able to dance from birth (Michael Dennis, "Today's book of poetry").

The English translation of new work from a celebrated Danish poet. Frayed Opus for Strings & Wind Instruments is a collection of poems that zooms in and out of places and states of mind, from a lit bicycle shed in the back yard to a root canal in November, from a typhoon in Hong Kong to instincts astray in various Copenhagen neigbourhoods. Elegantly translated by Canadian collaborators Per Brask and Patrick Friesen, these dreamlike poems attempt, with honesty and humour, to fathom what it is to inhabit a specifically unspecific point in life—not to mention in the Universe.

With a dozen poems previously published in the Paris Review, Danish poet Carsten René Nielsen is already a familiar name to U.S. poetry readers. These dark prose poems - reminiscent of Charles Simic – map out a uniquely European territory with chilling, cinematic clarity.

Højdepunkter are a concentrated selection of Jørgen Gustava Brandt's poetry. As the title says, it consists of only highlights. From here, the reader can go on to larger selections or to the individual collections of poems (publisher's description, translated).

A cognitive scientist by trade, Per Aage Brandt's poems resemble little puzzle boxes—all quite short with lines of almost identical length. But within this seemingly rigid structure, he explores a vast range of topics, from death and communication to catastrophes, economics, intimacy, dreams, and cats. At once philosophical and playful, these poems stimulate the mind and are also disarmingly human. if I were a suicide bomber, by profession, so to speak, I would choose a deserted place, climb up on a big boulder, focus my mind intensely on the world's most insane, stupid, malodorous, and in every respect repulsive ideas, evoke and display them, scrutinize their features very precisely before my inner eye and ear, and then, when all finally was totally clear, I would activate the detonator in my belt (goodbye, ideas). In addition to his poetry, Per Aage Brandt has published a large number of books on the subjects of semiotics, linguistics, culture, and music. He has also translated Molière and the Marquis de Sade, among others, and has had some of his translations set to music in Frederik Magle's Cantabile. Thom Satterlee received his MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Arkansas, and has published two previous collections of Danish poetry in translation. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN America, and won the Translation Prize from the American-Scandinavian Foundation.

For some time now Mette Moestrup, one of Scandinavia's most important contemporary writers, has been writing an edgy poetry about the body, about being a mother and a lover in Denmark. She is renowned for love verse as uninhibited as it is feminist, and her provocative, mischievous, sexy poetry also happens to be headily intellectual and full of references to anything and everything, from Batman to Rilke. Moestrup holds true to form with this wildly interwoven collection full of word play and formal avant-garde experiments, kitchensinkfuls of references, recurring themes of ethnicity and sexuality, war and violence, sustained motifs, mythical female figures on a sensation-seeking TV talk show. But all of this, and much more, with an unease, an edginess, a vulnerability as political controversies and racism repeatedly appear to question what at first seems playful. It is a work that delights then challenges the delight. Kingsize is Mette Moestrup's third and most acclaimed book. It won the Danish Montana Literature Prize for innovative writing.

'All my Living Wellsprings are in you', says God to His people in Psalm 87:7. The title seems apt for the poetic works of the Danish poet–pastor N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783–1872) who wrote over a third of the hymns in the present Danish Hymnbook as poet, adaptor, or translator. Living Wellsprings contains a wide selection of Grundtvig's best-known hymns and songs along with a number of his shorter poems—162 items in all—in new translations. This is the first comprehensive collection of the poetry of one of the pre-eminent builders of the Danish nation, who regarded Danish history, language, and song as absolutely indispensable to the life of what he termed 'the state, the church, and the school'...

Livsstil is a collection of what could be called 'contemporary poems': a series of poems about and with a clear stance on the time and the world in which we live (publisher's description, translated).

Nominated for the 2021 Nordic Council Literature Prize, My Jewel Box (Mit smykkeskrin) marks the final installment of Ursula Andkjær Olsen's visionary trilogy, a "fairy tale of the universe" investigating grief, bodies, motherhood, and the physical and economic inequalities of modern planetary life. Rendered into diamond-sharp English by award-winning translator Katrine ÿgaard Jensen, My Jewel Box mounts a cosmically human (and non-human) re-approach to a grief-stricken earth, a place of all times entangled.

Naturligvis consists of poems that are partly about daily life, about living, about getting older, about art and artists (including about Preben Wölck and Erland Knudssøn Madsen), about nature, especially Thy, from which you have a nice view of Mors, where the author lives. All written with the unsophisticated simplicity and straightforwardness that characterizes all of Knud Sørensen's work (publisher's description, translated).

Queen's Gate is the woman's way into the world. The gate signals transformation. What does one go into? And what is left behind? 'From water you have come,' writes Pia Tafdrup, creating her own myth through a sequence of highly sensual poems centred on water in all its forms: the waterdrop, the lake, the river, the well, the sea, vital liquids, the bath, the rain, the rainbow. Water streams through poems in which images are bodied from woman to nature: meltwater rivers 'run smooth as the muscle fibre of veins' while a woodsnipe pecks its beak into sand 'as quickly as a sewing machine's needle plunges into the dress'.

Pia Tafdrup is one of Denmark's leading poets. She has received the Nordic Literature Prize—Scandinavia's most prestigious literary award—and the Swedish Academy's Nordic Prize. This new translation of her work combines two recent collections, The Migrant Bird's Compass and Salamander Sun, which comprise the third and fourth parts of a quartet written over ten years: the first two parts are The Whales in Paris and Tarkovsky's Horses (published in English by Bloodaxe in 2010 as Tarkovsky's Horses and other poems). The Migrant Bird's Compass is a book of poems about the dimensions of travel, either to specific countries or as an inner journey. The route from birth to death is also portrayed. Travel demands commitment and curiosity. The only predictable thing about it is the unpredictable. Travel implies vulnerability, but also much that has happened at home while one was away. The poems are about the experience of 'resting in myself / despite the fire in the centre of the earth'. Salamander Sun presents 60 poems, one for each year, from 1952, when Pia Tafdrup was born, to 2011; from the first chaotic sensations, through the gradual discovery of the world and its diversity, and of language, its possibilities and challenges; from growing up on a farm, puberty, study, politics, love, to becoming a poet, having two sons, getting older and having old parents; to leaving one's mark and understanding one's place in the passage of time. The poems cast light backwards, butalso seek a focus in the future. Together with The Whales in Paris and Tarkovsky's Horses the two books form a quartet that centres on the theme of journeying and passage, its individual parts creating a field of tension. Each part portrays an element: water, earth, air and fire, each represented by a creature, and each part has a key figure: the beloved person, the father, the mother and the "I" that recalls its life. The quartet is an attempt to find structure in the midst of chaos.

The 1978 debut collection by Danish poet, Michael Strunge in a bilingual edition, with a foreword by Victor Sousa. Informed by Rimbaud, Bowie and the punk movement to name but a few influences, Michael Strunge remains one of the most loved writers in modern Danish literature. With his unflinching ethics and his explosive poems about love and the city, his oeuvre of eleven collections is an incredible achievement in a very short life that was heavily impacted by recurrent mental health issues. Strunge took his own life in 1986, aged only 27, but his legacy lives on and continues to inspire new generations of writers, musicians and artists.

Third-Millennium Heart is a collection of poetry meticulously interweaving biological systems with architectural annexes, mythological compositions and linguistic logics, while mercilessly turning the most intimate chambers of the body inside out and exposing the heart as a very public and thoroughly political arena.

Jørgen Leth is one of Denmark's foremost modern poets and a leading international filmmaker. Poems and films: two sides of his extensive oeuvre, intricately interwoven. Films like The Perfect Human, playfully revived by Leth and enfant terrible countryman Lars von Trier in the irresistible The Five Obstructions,. Films like Leth's latest (of forty-three), Erotic Man, recently premiered to rave reviews and walk-outs at the Toronto Film Festival. Watch the poem. Read the film. Leth was doing intertextuality almost before they called it anything. Trivial Everyday Things is a collection of Leth's poems spanning some forty years, selected and translated with exquisite restraint by Martin Aitken. It is, astonishingly, the first book-length collection of Leth's poetry to appear in English.

Danish poet Morten Søndergaard has been living abroad and spent some time in the little Italian town of Vinci. The poetry in this collection is the result of that experience. It dramatizes various aspects of (post)modern reality, dreams, family life, architecture, sculpture gathered together as a landscape through which the reader can wander, thoughtful, bemused, amused, but always as language's companion. Søndergaard's creativity is as forcefully life-embracing as his poetry is convincing and captivating. He is also typical of the younger Danish generation's approach to literature: anything goes, but seriously. Vinci, Later was shortlisted for the Nordic Council's Prize in 2003. Morten Søndergaard carefully brushes the lint off our shoulders, then crouches behind the controls of his poems and does everything to dislodge us from our feet. As doomful and slapstick as Beckett, he gives voice to the ground we stomp all over, and the stuff aside from people that peoples our world. What I'm saying is: This is an astonishing collection (Stuart Ross).