Henrik Nordbrandt is often characterised as a poet who has never found a place to settle. From a purely biographical point of view this characterisation is precise in that, for the greater part of his adult life, Nordbrandt has chosen to live in exile far from Denmark in the Mediterranean countries of Turkey, Greece, Italy and Spain.
The characterisation is also precise inasmuch as Departures and Arrivals (the title of a 1974 poetry collection, Opbrud og Ankomster) is an ongoing theme in his work, which to date consists of twenty poetry collections, books of essays, children´s books, a Turkish diary and a cookery book. The poet-I in Nordbrandt´s work is always on the way to somewhere else, and arrival merely brings with it the realisation that the new place also has the potential for departure. Being displaced has been a fixture of modern writing since the romantic movement, but with Nordbrandt it has been transformed into restlessness and has come to the fore as a primary explicit theme.
The travel issue is therefore seemingly only an external concern. A closer inspection of Nordbrandt´s work reveals that the poet-I´s constant moving around from place to place should be understood as an image of human existence as such: restlessness becomes prevalent because the poet-I is - quite literally - beside himself.
One can talk about a double consciousness in Nordbrandt´s writing: on the one hand, actual presence is a constant point of reference, on the other hand it is quite clear that presence becomes most conspicuous and authentic at the moment it is withdrawn. Attendance in the here and now is only possible in the knowledge that this present is one single element in a succession of nows which supersede and make comparison with one another.
It is largely in this constant mobility between presence and absence that Nordbrandt finds his poetic energy and it is also in this aspect that Nordbrandt´s writing has been most innovative for Danish writing. The poet-I´s reflection on the impossibility of maintaining a fixed perspective on the world also means that the language in Nordbrandt´s poetry is in perpetual fermentation. The reader is therefore drawn into the evocation of images, as metaphors are erected within metaphors, to be succeeded by allegories and surprisingly turn into symbols in a sequence of displacements which, in principle, could go on for ever. In this sense, language is displaced: it seems as if language can contain the elements of presence, but, in the same way that the poet-I feels strongest when a distance has been established from himself (via time or space), language also carries the paradox that it manifests presence by writing across the breadth of absence.
In 2000, Henrik Nordbrandt received The Nordic Council Prize for Literature for Drømmebroer (Dream Bridges).
