Of stab-wounds and mobiles.

By : Finn Stein Larsen

One may still use the title of her first collection as a passable route into her divided conceptual world. It was called Dicentra spectabilis, the botanical Latin name for the flower bleeding heart. Of course the plant is tangible in Kure Andersen’s verse, but its poetic laws of growth are linguistic-etymological ones. It is a plant with two (di-) visible (spectabilis) centres. The same is true of Kure Andersen’s lyrical universe. It is split into a Danish-Ribe reality (the country of her childhood) and an Italian-Umbrian one (from her studies and travels). Here there is nature and there is art. Here there are flat marsh landscapes, salt meadows, westerly gales and cruel dike-breaches, there there are rose windows, shimmering piazzas, glass mosaics, bas-reliefs and acanthus capitals, life put into artistic form. Here she is located and there is where she longs for, her yearning moves in that direction. Of course this is a crude over-simplified insight into her concrete living space, for Italian art can also be ossified and dead, while the natural surroundings of the marshes can be extremely gentle. But her visible double centre (dicentra spectabilis), her fruitful division and distension also constitute poetic existence in other ways, as for example in the form of splits between vision and reflection, between red passion and blue freezing, between growth and structure, life and schema.
[…]

Ophelia’s red clothes
intone between the houses
in November’s silent
storm

From the fountain flows
a fever of
glass to congealed
spring

Here let me point to a constant imagistic and conceptual pattern in Kure Andersen’s poetry: an unfolding of life that is blocked. ‘Piazza Navona’ is an infinitely melancholy poem.  Everything here is spoiled and crooked, nothing reaches its goal or its completion. Ophelia is (consciously, of course) located in the wrong place and probably also in the wrong time. Her intoning voice hardly crosses her lips and even reaches no ear, but is converted into a desperate red visual signal. The sound aspect of the poem has also been turned down, for the November gale is silent. May we refresh ourselves afterwards at the fountain in the centre of the piazza? Not at all. For it doubtless works, but it resembles an immobile glass sculpture saying that all that is coveted will fall or be revoked. Yes, there is alliteration (Kure Andersen has been mocked for its overuse), but they are subtly chosen: for the s’s whistle and seethe as they should here.

And so the artistic will has broken through behind the reader’s back and in spite of the hopelessly melancholy atmosphere, for blocked manifestations of life and ossified movement may easily indicate death, but they are also a distinguishing feature of art, which stops time and situation and freezes them. And this is what has happened in the poem. The material is refractory, the manifestations of life on a low flame, but they have been processed and condensed and at last they stand there in psychically collected form: a ‘congealed springtime’.

From Vandmærker. Nærlæsninger af ny dansk litteratur. ed. Anders Østergaard, Dansklærerforeningen 1999

Translated by David McDuff