With bridal veil and silver-washed fritillary
It would have been a good deal easier if Inger Christensen had written poems about flowers that we all know such as roses, tulips and violets. Instead she uses plant names such as wallflower, stock and bridal veil. The advantage of not really knowing what these plants look like is that the words seem to separate themselves from the plants they refer to. For example, a bridal veil is also the veil worn by the bride on her wedding day, and this makes it easier to connect the word with butterfly names such as Camberwell beauty and silver-washed fritillary. Exactly the same thing happens with the names of colours and minerals when instead of bright red and rust brown Inger Christensen uses words like vermilion and ochre.
Death has you in its sights
There are no definitive guides to understanding poetry, but if you lower your guard then the magpie moth will truly delude your senses with death's head hawk-moths and emperor moths floating in the air. It will also be easier to understand that a bay of tears is not necessarily a geographical location. Maybe we are not supposed to know where the Brajcino Valley is, as long as we know that it is the place where even the heaviest objects rise into the air as weightlessly as stray thoughts on a hot summer's day.
But it will take several readings of the poems to make the little hairs at the nape of your neck to stand up. Isn't it true that two very important things change places as you read? At first, the poet looked death straight in the eye, but in the end it sounds like Death itself suddenly has her in its sights.
Dorthe Sondrup Andersen is a Master of Arts of Comparative Literature and an author and writer on cultural affairs. Her books include "The Golden Age without the Gilt" ("Guldalder uden forgyldning") (People's Press, 2004).
"Polaroid transfer" of a butterfly. Photo: Tommy Allen/Polfoto.