Full Description
Pia Tafdrup is one of Denmark's leading poets. She has published over 20 books in Danish since her first collection appeared in 1981, including widely admired sequences of themed collections. The latest of these is a series of five books focussing on the human senses, her Senses Quintet (2014-2022), which the critic Carsten Palmer Schale has called 'a cathedral of the soul' and 'the best collection of poems written in Scandinavia in the past 20 years'.
Bloodaxe published David McDuff's translation of the first two collections in the quintet, The Taste of Steel and The Smell of Snow, in one volume in 2021. This edition brings together his translations of the third, fourth and fifth parts, The Sight of Light, The Sound of Clouds and The Touch of Skin.
All parts of life are mediated through the five senses in the five books, including the way of the world and the losses that people sustain during the course of their lives - the disappearance of friends and family members, but also the erosion of control of one's own existence. The themes of ecology, war and conflict are never far away, and there is a constant recognition of the circular nature of life, the interplay of the generations.
'The main theme is of a deeply existential nature. How it is to be in the world. What it's like to use your five senses to perceive, and to some extent, incorporate the world. Through taste, sight, smell, sound and touch. [...] It's no coincidence that touch - the sensation of the skin being touched - is the last in the suite. In Tafdrup's universe, touch is above the other senses. The skin frames the individual and therefore sets a limit to the self from the environment. It is the human conditions of life she has immersed herself in; existence and its more or less concrete forms of appearance. Earth, beach, sea, sky, fire - and human as a function of these elements. Like body, as language, as memory. It is in the meeting, collision and interaction between nature and culture, between discipline and sexuality, between the depths and heights of sensuality and the details of the everyday world.' - Carsten Palmer Schale, Opulens magasin, 2023
Pia Tafdrup's previous series of themed collections was The Salamander Quartet (2002-2012). Written over ten years, its first two parts were The Whales in Paris and Tarkovsky's Horses, translated by David McDuff and published by Bloodaxe in 2010 as Tarkovsky's Horses and other poems. This was followed in 2015 by Salamander Sun and other poems, McDuff's translation of The Migrant Bird's Compass and Salamander Sun, the third and fourth parts of the quartet. Pia Tafdrup received the 1999 Nordic Council Literature Prize - Scandinavia's most prestigious literary award - for Queen's Gate, which was published in David McDuff's English translation by Bloodaxe in 2001. Also in 2001, she was appointed a Knight of the Order of Dannebrog, and in 2006 she received the Nordic Prize from the Swedish Academy.
Contents
THE SIGHT OF LIGHT (2018)
I The darkness dreams the sun out
19 Birth light
20 Bonfire
21 From the bedrock
22 Tokyo by night
24 Desire is born night after night
25 The eyes, the planets of the skull
28 The katsura tree
II Burning point
31 Shoals
32 Narcisa grows keen on technology
34 Expectations
36 Burning glass
37 Feng Shui
38 The other side
40 Swallows
III Mirror
42 The nightdress
43 Mirror image
45 Bread and circuses
47 My sister with a halo
49 The camera's caress
IV Ordeal by fire
53 Fiery sword
54 Icarus
57 The fire is mother to the ash
59 Forest fires
60 Flight
V Life is a drama
63 Jacques-Louis David: The Death of Marat
66 Pablo Picasso: Guernica
68 Frida Kahlo: The Wounded Deer
70 Gerhard Richter: Five Doors
73 Anselm Kiefer: Starfall
VI Inspection
77 Arctic wilderness
78 The bull's gaze
80 Angry composer
81 School for architects
82 The eye of the Cyclops
84 The borders between us
86 Sightseeing spot
VII The shadow of a dream
89 Perpetual state of emergency
90 Night-blind
92 Librarian in grey weather
94 Picture stream
96 My view reduced
97 The inner cinema
99 Blind trust
VIII Transparency
103 Aura
104 From Barents' final voyage
106 Prelude to coupling
107 Veil
108 The rainbow
IX The soul in the eye
110 Carpe diem
111 Your gaze meets mine
113 Spark of life
114 Embrace
116 Shone through
117 To make women and men shine
118 Passage, light
*
THE SOUND OF CLOUDS (2020)
I Prelude. The sounds are simply here
123 Hear with eye and heart
124 Clouds don't stop
125 Danish daily sounds
128 The conch shell
130 The sense of hearing never switches off
II Acoustic alphabet
134 Harmony
135 The sound of the name
137 Newborn language
139 We are children, we shout
141 Rain
143 Many-stringed instrument
145 Listening inward
III The pain threshold of eardrums
149 Thunderclap
150 The Devil's interval
152 The street's epicentre
154 It could be gunfire
156 Beethoven maltreated
IV Resonance rooms
158 Absence of sound
159 Tinnitus
161 Seasons intercepted
163 Do I hear the radio?
165 Song for a foetus
V Nobody owns the clouds
169 Nobody owns the clouds. For Glenn Gould
171 Star-pulse. For Patti Smith
173 O Superwoman. For Laurie Anderson
175 Soul on a journey. For Brian Eno
177 'Simple Song Number 3'. For Sumi Jo
VI Redevelopments
180 Bees in Linden
181 Gong
183 Saunte Number 17
185 The sewing-machine
187 The bang before it comes
VII Out of a mouth
190 No one has seen God
191 Edvard Munch: The Scream
192 Your voice
194 My voice
197 The deaf seamstress
199 Like two people present
201 Authentic voice?
203 Hephaestus forges
205 From the realm of the dead
VIII Sound pictures
209 The room drawn
210 Through the open window
212 The bells of City Hall
214 Stillness before the hurricane
217 Unwanted sounds
218 Centre
219 The deer and I
IX Postlude. Freedom exists
223 The left hand's road to freedom
224 Clouds touch me
226 White noise
228 Van Gogh's ear
233 Speak softly
234 Pauses
235 The stillness is coming
*
THE TOUCH OF SKIN (2022)
I Yearning sits beneath the skin
240 Favourite word
241 Have only my body
243 Butterfly wings
245 My skin my limit
248 Embrace
II Confrontation with elements
250 The wind loves me
251 The water transforms
253 Fire and song
255 Earth poem
257 The cannula through the skin
III The hands
260 My mother's blind cousin
261 In my pocket
263 Bread
265 The rose I hold
267 Bodily visitation
269 Touching decay
271 Massage
IV Fight
275 Fight club
276 Local anaesthetic
277 Under the skin behind the ribs
279 Battles
280 Scars
281 My knee
283 The Chernobyl wind
V Five materials. A catalogue of touch
286 Trees, people
287 The marble ball
289 The hand finds its way to the glass
291 The lady holds the unicorn's horn. A gobelin
293 Nefertiti. A plaster bust
VI Presence
297 The star place
298 The fingers meet the world
300 Child and ladybird
302 The feet like sand
304 The enigma of the flesh
306 Capsized robin
307 Today I got the explanation
309 The body feels the liquids leave it
311 Round the table
VII Absence
314 Embraces, eternity
315 In constant reconstruction of a dance
317 The bat effect
321 The hand-shy child
322 Gentle whispering
VIII Caress
326 Your hand and mine
327 With a creature in his arms
328 The bench in Gudhjem
328 Your face
331 You are a sky
332 Crazy and in love
334 The horizon
IX The solar system of hope
336 The solar system of hope
337 My son has built a fire
338 A landscape awakes in me
339 We move the night
343 The weight of a life
*
NOTES
349 The Sight of Light
350 The Sound of Clouds
351 The Touch of Skin
