Alphabet

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.