As a poet Nicolaj Stochholm (born 1966) is a natural, and one whose expressive, visionary imagery won him instant acclaim. In the course of 10 years, with just four collections of poetry, Stochholm has established himself as one of the most innovative members of the younger generation of Danish poets. There is a restless energy to his poems, and an almost mercurial drive that finds it hard to put down roots anywhere.
Ever since the publication of his first collection of poetry, Biografi (Biography, 1991) – which is not, as it happens, in any way an (auto)biography - Stochholm has been presenting us with an outlandish, anonymous, fragmented poetic universe, wherein the elemental world and the language of poetry enter into some surprising exchanges, out of which a poetic ’I’ eventually emerges. Another form of exchange occurs in Sammenfald (Merging, 1992), in which mirror images point outwards, at a boundless space, and inwards, at an identity in the process of metamorphosing, while at all times under threat from the outside. This gives rise to moods and feelings of gloomy absorption, in which the ’I’ seeks refuge in metaphor and the winged flight of words. Stochholm’s poems are, in the main, extremely sensual, but a dissecting writer’s eye is always at work, splitting everything in two and forcing confrontations between opposing elements – death and daily life, permanence and the finite, day and night, poetry and reality.
This same dichotomy is also much in evidence in Nicholaj Stochholm’s main work to date, Rekonstruction (Reconstruction, 1998), in which previously so disjointed schemes and ambivalent moods are wedded to a new lucidity. As, for example, in the following lines, which constitute both a word to the outside world and a prophesy addressed to the writing self: ”...Alone you may be mirrored in the pattern of the night and venture out among things/ find the altering nature of things between your vocal cords, and so you begin/ to find your way in the darkness and your inner depths can sometimes fly/ each with its wings of skin”. The links are forged primarily through Stochholm’s way of deliberately playing with the poetic tradition, with voices from Dante, by way of the Babylonian myth of creation and the voyage of Odysseus, to those of diverse modern poets making themselves heard in the background of Stochholm’s poetic space. But while others may contribute, adding their voices to the poems, Stochholm’s poetry is stringently controlled.
Above all else, it is this stringency and a spine-tingling preoccupation with the form of expression that makes Nicolaj Stochholm’s poetry so original. It is fraught with raw, intense images of a broad visionary scope, compulsive rhythms of great inherent weight and an insistent vitality and acuity that challenges any narrow-minded outlook on life. Nicolaj Stochholm is looking for the ultimate freedom. Stochholm clearly believes that the poet has a special part to play: ”the poet is the transparent centre for others, with a head full of rainbows and a great lust for words. Poetry is the cornerstone of silence and the palace of the unseen, in which the sundered whole can, for a moment, find rest.
(2003)
