...Monuments in the whiteness

The Places

By : Katja Pedersen

Whiteness can be a blind spot in the poem or a synonym for silence. But whiteness is also coupled in a large number of poems with sorrow, suffering, pain, snow, winter, deserted houses, empty conches, mourning for the past and longing for the future. Whiteness is also the paper and the place where there is the chance to leave an existential stagnation in order to momentarily attain an aesthetic, resonant presence in life. With a distinctive use of alliteration, and by stretching language to the utmost, Annemette Kure Andersen seeks to produce a form in which ‘Meadows breathe silence/ turn time into/glowing/rhyme’ (Espalier, p. 54).

The poem ‘Those Places’ and some other poems in Dicentra spectabilis entitled ‘The Silent Places’, ‘Places’, ‘Sketch for a Memory Image’, ‘A Lone Swallow’, have in common the fact of being poems in which something or everything has already happened, and in which nothing more happens. Annemette Kure Andersen’s poetry is in general the place for a waiting, a remembering and a fixing of what has happened, of the places and the voices. At the same time, in ‘Those Places’ the interchange between art and life is pointed to. Not only in such a way that life and sense perception become art, but also the other way round: that the aesthetic choices and the beauty of the poems are able to become a part of existence. Annemette Kure Andersen registers life – in the poem ‘Those Places’ – in ultra-short, suggestive images at a distance, absence, oblivion, fear, love and the memory of a love in order to see what perceptions, what existential signs it might bring with it.

The places here can be understood as concrete geographic locations and as spiritual zones or threads in the human person, between people and in the person’s sense perception of the world, with which a duality of loss and memory is associated; a duality that is exposed in the poems’ grappling with the past, in their attempt to be ‘writing places’. Absence determines presence and vice versa, and the timbres and beauty of the poems are not all achieved by harmonising the contrasts or the ambiguities away, but on the contrary by making the antitheses inseparable from the form.

In a continuation of a symbolist-modernist tradition, the poems of Annemette Kure Andersen are extremely conscious as poems, artificial in relation to reality. At the same time this poetry believes in the ability of symbol and rhythm to speak the truth about the ‘I’, about the poet’s ability to make herself see and listen to the concealed, invisible connections that affect existence. ‘The places’ are thus also allusions to the meaning that is absent, and has not necessarily allowed itself to be written out in the poem, but which the process – the poem’s rhythm, sounds and linguistic flora – is none the less able to point to: ‘Those places/ stand now like monuments / in the whiteness’ (Dicentra spectabilis, p.42) or ‘You crush/ the hawthorn/ in your hand’ (Dicentra spectabilis, p. 40). The white mirror and monuments in the whiteness are in other words metaphors for what on the one hand separates us from the insight into life and ourselves, and on the other hand attracts a meaning to it: they become flat, or the paper that – again and again – must be broken by a poem.

From Spring, Journal of Modern Danish Literature, nr. 11 1997.

Translated by David McDuff