Bloodaxe Books Ltd Alphabet

Inger Christensen (1935-2009) was one of Denmark's best-known poets.Her poetry reflects a complex philosophical background, yet it has 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, crystallizing into words both the beauty and the potential for destruction that permeate our world and our times.In this collection, she has created a system by combining the alphabet with Fibonnaci's numeric sequence, in which each number is equal to the sum of the two preceding numbers: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc. alphabet is about the relationship between people and nature and, like it, is itself a form of creation.With the word exist as the pivot, the poems move -- from the first wondering confirmation, apricot trees exist -- out into the world to life and death, the planet and calamity.