The condition of secrecy Selected essays

English readers are treated to a quality translation of essays from Christensen (1935-2009), featuring literary criticism, meditations, and autobiography, all in the Danish poet and novelist's whimsical style. In the first essay, "Freedom, Equality, and Fraternity in the Summerhouse," Christensen beautifully recalls her "first aesthetic experiences"-the sights and sounds of summer in Denmark-which serves to introduce one of the book's central themes: the relationship of the individual to experience and nature. In "Interplay," she ponders what it means to see the world from a child's eyes, recalling, "When I was nine years old, the world too was 9 years old... earth and body as like as two pennies," and concludes that "the physical world and the inner world are one, indivisible." In "The Dream of the City," she considers this thematic preoccupation, asking, "Why write about nature at all, when most people live in cities?" Christensen is at her most intriguing when posing questions, as when she wonders, "Does art originate from the same necessity that gives rise to beehives, the songs of larks, and the dances of cranes?" and asking whether it is possible to write poetry that is compelling if read "out loud to a cockroach?" These borderline silly yet profoundly imaginative questions make for a thought-provoking reading experience. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Insights into a poet who was definitely not living in an ivory tower.Danish author Christensen (Light, Grass, and Letter in April, 2011, etc.) was one of Scandinavia's finest experimental poets. Thoughtful and ruminative, these essays, skillfully rendered by translator Nied, reveal what poetry meant to Christensen (1935-2009) and how she wrote it. She calls herself "an almost insanely enthusiastic enthusiast of language.' " Her concerns were manynature, art, philosophy, freedom, equality, and politics, including Ronald Reagan and Alexander Haigand her artistic influences wide-ranging: Blake and Newton, Magritte, Elias Canetti, Chomsky, Maurice Blanchot, Merleau-Ponty, and Giordano Bruno. In the first essay, Christensen recalls having three "experiences" as a young girl, "still nearly indescribable." Those "warm summer images" were her "first aesthetic experiences." "Silk, the Universe, Language, the Heart" is her poetic discourse on another discourse, Lu Chi's Wen Fu. The author explores how language is alive for her: "All nouns are very lonely," adjectives, "helpless," adverbs, "quite strong-willed," verbs, "very agreeable," and prepositions, "nearly invisible." By writing poetry, Christensen believes, "we're trying to produce something that we ourselves are already a product of." She envisions the Big Bang as a "poem" we're "in the middle of." When she writes, she "sometimes pretend[s] it's not me but language itself that's writing." As "human beings, we can't avoid being part of the artistic process." Christensen excitedly describes working on her poetry collection alphabet, which was a "great adventure." Poetry, declares the author, is "not truthit's not even the dream of truthpoetry is passionit's a game, maybe a tragic game, the game we play with a world that plays its own game with us."Christensen's probing, questioning, hopeful voice was an important one and is missed, but we can still hear it in this provocative book. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.