In the labyrinthine Desert

By : Erik Skyum Nielsen

Morten Søndergaard's new poems are about poetry's special way of knowing things about things.

An exhilarating feature common to the most inquisitive of the Danish poets of the 1990s has been their keen appetite for a dialogue between art and science, especially the natural sciences. Before surrendering to the imagination af artists, they try to ensure that other forms of cognition have reached the very limit of what they can discover and express. Poetry's traditional distrust of reason only begins in these poets when a primary confidence has been exhausted - that is to say confidence in the intellect as a means of exploring and discovering the world.

One can only sympathize with this tendency in the most recent poetry. For why proclaim chaos if judicious charting is still possible, and why set out as an amateur in fields of understanding in which the expertise of others is still valid?

The dialogue with the natural sciences and other familiar forms of knowledge is something we have encountered, for instance, in Peter Høeg's novels, which frequently introduce comments so sagacious they might have come straight from an encyclopaedia. But the dialogue continues in Merete Pryds Helle's far more unfettered fictional fantasies about environments in a state of chaos. We have also heard voices with a professional ring turn to short or ultra-short prose, for instance Solvej Balle and Peter Adolphsen, while Niels Lyngsø's long, ambitious poem Stof (Substance) from 1996 showed receptiveness to science colliding head-on with a proud insistence on poetic form.

Morten Søndergaard (born 1964) first appeared on the arena in 1992, at the same time as Niels Lyngsø, and in 1994 he published the collection of poems entitled Ild og tal (Fire and Numbers). In 1996 he attracted favourable attention with the book Ubestemmelsessteder (Indefinable Destinations) - square-cut poetical sketches from the Vesterbro district of Copenhagen. Especially memorable in that book was an amusing text about the mystery of Man's standing upright. First came the pedantic encyclopaedia definition, but then a phenomenological description of increasing lyrical intensity.

The same step, from science to passion, from professional precision to precise poetical guesswork is found everywhere in Søndergaard's latest book Bier dør sovende (Bees Die Sleeping), which in addition to a free-standing introductory poem (on the very subject of researching and seeing) consists of five sections. Only in one of these, a series of "Public Announcements" can the constuction be said to be rather loose. Two others are shaped as light sequences, and finally there are two closely structured long poems exploiting the whole gamut of both intellect and expression.

An examination of Søndergaard's choice of words shows how closely ha has committed himself to a diologue with more exact forms of knowledge than the poem's special way of knowing things about the world and existence, what we perhaps might call poetry's phenomenological conjekture. Physics, mathematics and chemistry, biochemistry and biology, geology and geodesy, indeed even astronomy and modern astrophysics, provide vocabulary for these extended texts, which sometimes have almost the quality of an arabesque. To read these poems is like setting of on a voyage of discovery through a land that cannot be charted or chedked and is constantly unpredictable. We travel in a vest, labyrinthine desert - to queto one of Søndergaard's characteristic paradoxes from the sequence entitled Compas (Compass).

It is demanding reading, but it is never boring. For in the midst of his grandiose epistemological project, the poet possesses simplicity, sweetness and humour. The driving force in the woirk is not faith in an ultimate truth - rather simply inquisitiveness: "I say it again, ther is nothing else for it." We seek, so it runs, a structure that is rational in the secrets told when flower muscles close the flowers and faces whirl away, like burning scraps of paper. But chaos is splintered in the shape of the porm, in the mouth of the poet. Instead of certainty, we have to take doubt with us, "we had to translate from a toreign tonguw, something we all the time found a little more surely formulated by weeds and adverts for office fitttings".

These words are found towards the end of "Compass" a long, involved poem in 28 sections on what it is to write a poem and thereby to open yourself to words and objects, and for words as objects. A poem which promises well for Morten Søndergaard as, like the rest of the work, it is written in a fertile duality of en the one hand, confidence on behalf of poetry and, on the oter, a humble receptiveness to other forms of knowledge - all those things on which poetry broders.

This article first appeared in Danish Literary Magazine 15, 1999

Translated by W. Glyn Jones