Søren Ulrik Thomsen prizes craft: the crafting of each collection, each individual poem, and each individual verse. He is not satisfied with a poem until he has thoroughly explored its subject matter and taken every risk. Nor is he satisfied with a collection of poetry until he has established the strongest possible tension between form and content. The prerequisite to this goal is maintaining a firm limit on what is said and the way it is said. For that reason, death is an ever-present reality in his poems. Thomsen’s highly developed understanding of the music of language and its ways of making meaning inform his six volumes of poetry, one volume of poetic theory (Mit lys brænder; My Light Burns), and one book-length essay reflecting on the creative process (En dans på gloser; A Dance on Glosses), earning him a unique position in Danish poetry. His position stems not only from the lyrical cogency, rhythms, and intense imagery that mark his poems, but also from his ability to carry a dual role: he is both a poet and a brilliant thinker who publicly, in articles and essays, reasons his way through everything that might be affecting or influencing him. This dual role reinforces Thomsen’s status as a poet on the cutting edge and a thoughtful, timely voice to be reckoned with.
In his debut collection, City Slang (1981), Thomsen focuses on the relationship between body and city—a city equally chilling and fascinating to the poetic narrator. The experiences of alienation and distance gain immediacy through a strict form in which poetry itself emerges as a means of existing. City Slang carries powerful, sensuous images of city, body and death. Thomsen shifts his focus in his second collection,Ukendt under den samme måne (Unknown Under the Same Moon, 1982), which centers on mystical, sexual, and ecstatic experiences expressed in lines such as “the inverted seas of cunt and asshole” and
"Come out in light, hit evening
come out in blue, hit coolness
come out in body, hit blood-heat
come out in blood, hit crashing seas
come in a crash, let go, go on
come to night
become one."
For the poetic narrator, it is a matter of becoming one with his condition, immersing himself in it, and of a minimalist exploration of language per se. Formulating his poetics, Mit lys brænder—omrids af en ny poetik (My Light Burns: Contours of a New Poetics, 1985) enabled Thomsen to gather up and transcend the experiences he had harvested in his first two volumes. In Nye digte (New Poems, 1987), his third collection, he seeks out the natural world to a surprising degree, striving to create a balance between happiness and unhappiness as his intricate poetic language creates an interchange between traditional European lyricism and his own time period. His aesthetics revolve around sea, garden, networks, and the unimaginable. In his fourth collection, Hjemfalden (Reverted, 1991) he turns inward to examine existence, experience, and the transitory nature of the human condition. These poems become an existential problem set, unfolding into metaphysical and religious configurations and a search for beauty. Thomsen revisits that search in En dans på gloser (A Dance on Glosses), an essay-like, multifaceted account of how Hjemfalden came to be, including its metaphysical beginnings. For example, he describes seeing the book in his mind’s eye and knowing how many poems it would contain before he started writing them. The thematic underpinnings of existence that Thomsen touches on here are then followed through to their furthest, arabesque outcome in Det skabtes vaklen (The Tottering of Creation, 1996), his fifth collection, examining the interplay between destruction and creation—in the world, and in the making of poems. Søren Ulrik Thomsen is the poet of the spaces between things. With surgical precision, he peels apart the existential and the everyday, a process clearly illuminated in his collection, Det værste og det bedste (The Worst and the Best, 2002). This volume can be read both as 21 independent poems and as one long poetic suite. Its poems, at once simpler, more universal, and more open than his earlier works, reveal above all an abiding gratitude for life.
(2003)
