Böcker av 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

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.