Simon Grotrian (b. 1961) made his debut in 1987 with Gennem
min hånd (Through My Hand)The first two collections are an attempt in language to chisel some concrete
images. A surrealistic collage technique characterises the idiom. In both of them, the poet keeps returning to a love affair, but this does not resolve a down-to-earth and transitory life. The hand, as a fixed point and image of the
palpable quality of the poetry and behaviour, constantly reappears as a fundamental motif.
Starting with the third collection, Næste himmel (Next Heaven) (1989), Grotrian finds his own natural style. Humour
plays an increasing part because the poet rises to his talent and thus has room
for a little extra. That extra shows itself moreover in homage to several artistic models. The avant-garde contest (collage and montage) culminates in Fire (Four) (1990), in which the poet finds his way forward to a form – four lines per poem – to which the poems conform. Although the form acts as an
overarching principle, it is at the same time undermined in the play on words in “fire”, which while meaning “four” in Danish also echoes the English word
“fire”. The apparent regularity is from a different point of view totally
irregular: in other words, the form is on fire. The collection thereby lives up
to an earlier assertion that “Form is/ absence/ and death”. The Danish infinitive “at fire” (to yield) further underlines this point. For the verb
contains both the above-mentioned meanings: partly to let go and partly in a
figurative sense to give in or yield.
After Fire Grotrian paused until 1993. This interval, an unusually long
one for Grotrian, indicates that something new is in the offing. Livsfælder (Life Traps) from 1993 thus also surprises
by its apostrophising and at times ode-like register. Grotrian has managed to
turn his destructive tendencies into something more edifying. The style still
bears traces of the general disintegration that for Grotrian’s poems is a
condition of which poetry as such has to take into account. The horizontal world of images in Grotrian’s first collections is punctured both
upwards and downwards, allowing space to emerge for a specific religious
experience. This arises as a result of the concrete treatment of the imagery.
What starts by working through the hand, now also works through the spirit.
The resounding Christianity that the experience shows itself to be remains an important path followed
throughout the remainder of the oeuvre, but it acts as an extension to what
beforehand was already a teeming idiom. Religiosity is not something that takes
over the poetical drive or flair, and the oeuvre can still be read as an
assault on current forms. Grotrian thus explains in an interview that he is
both a Christian and a postmodernist.
The year 2000 saw the publication of two books by this writer: Livet
er en ko (Life is a Cow) and Risperdalsonneterne
(The Risperdal Sonnets). The latter consists of poems that are to be thought of as sonnets, but the form is extremely inconsistent and only has the 14 lines in
common with a normal sonnet. Despite the gap between the images’ semantic fields, the poems are all the time able to keep together. This happens partly
by virtue of Grotrian’s remarkable work with sound and rhythm. In general, the
oeuvre is characterised by an intense fascination with language as material; a
material the importance of which is not always defined beforehand, but in which
the poet has the potential for interfering when he embarks on short cuts and
detours that have not been tried before. This happens for instance in inventive
plays on words of the same nature as in Fire.
This attitude of challenge also applies to tradition: Grotrian is not satisfied
merely to inscribe himself in it, but at the same time he uses it to find his
way in his own work.
Simon Grotrian’s advent as a
poet is a proclamation of a postmodern message, something that in itself
constitutes a contradiction. The possibility of gathering together such
disparate elements in the way this poetry does, is not only evidence of the
time we live in, but at the same time of the power of poetry in an otherwise
image-packed world.
