Our Frail and Flawed Existence

By : Neal Ashley Conrad

Søren Ulrik Thomsen (born 1956) is a remarkably precise and consistent poet who has brought out a small number of poetry collections of a very high quality. He is one of the most important writers of the poet generation which began to emerge and become established around 1980-81. With five poetry collections, two poetics and a number of reflective essays to his name, the poet and thinker Thomsen has attained special standing in contemporary Danish poetry.
 
Investigations of Man and Metaphysics
From his first collection, City Slang, in 1981 to the latest entitled Det Skabtes Vaklen 15 years later, Thomsen´s poems have been characterised by their detachment, their varied lyrical language and a constant need to delve into uncharted territory. Every collection represents a separate examination. City Slang explored the relationship between body and death, the self and the city. Ukendt under den samme måne (Unknown Under the Same Moon) from 1982 examined common experiences, the dissolve of the boundaries between the self and the world. In the third anthology, Nye digte (New Poems), the poems were true to tradition, focusing on the relationship between language and nature, body and soul, whilst the fourth, Hjemfalden (Reverted) from 1991 emphasised man´s subservience to the vagaries of life on metaphysical terms.
   The fifth and latest collection, Det skabtes vaklen (The Shaking of Creation), examines the frailty of our existence, its faltering rhythm and the unseen cracks in our daily lives. The poems are arabesques, a word which stems from Arabic ornamentation with its intricate patterns and stylised plant forms. In poetry, arabesques with their unstrophic form fail to rhyme and deal both with the irregular and the incomplete. Thomsen´s arabesques geminate and meander like the infinite spiral of writing or twisted shells. Just like the poet J. P. Jacobsen a hundred years ago, Thomsen uses the arabesque as a syntactic, rhythmical and aesthetic tool.
 
The Arabesque of Life
The poems in Det Skabtes Vaklen reveal the odd whims of creation, life´s unexpected turns, the things which never quite work out and those that we leave behind, along with the essentially unfinished and insoluble paradoxes we are left with when we stop to think about the real meaning of life.
Søren Ulrik Thomsen views life as cleft, a whole split into two halves. His poems bore into our existence and lay bare the hidden cracks, exposing the loose ends of our lives, the places where body, soul and spirit no longer interconnect in the way they did before. The poems set these disjointed elements apart and oscillate endlessly between opposing poles - day and night, darkness and light, life and death, body and soul, speech and silence, creation and destruction. The restlessness in the perspective is offset by the vertical upright form of the poems. Their form and the inner course of the book heal the rift between the fragments.

High Tension Reflection
Søren Ulrik Thomsen´s best poems are ambiguous moments of high tension which embody several levels at once: the existential, psychological, biological, philosophical, metapoetic, aesthetic, sexual,  and now also a cosmological level. The paradox is Thomsen´s preferred mental construct, and it is often used in a grotesquely humorous manner. The starting point is often an observation from daily life which sparks off a line of thought or a far-sweeping examination of the conditions of our existence.
   Thomsen has, from the very start, wanted to explore and shape the poem as a distinct setting for feelings, experience, reflection and aesthetic awareness. That is asking a great deal of poetry, but Thomsen believes that the act of writing poetry involves constant observation of the conditions of our existence. He does not therefore, like so many other poets, see any conflict between poetry and an ongoing analysis of creation. Poetry and thought are mutual prerequisites. This has resulted in two poetics, Mit lys brænder - Omrids af en ny poetik (1985) (My light burns - a framework for a new poetic) and En dans på gloser (1996) (A dance on words). Both works are, in essence, an examination of one or several earlier anthologies. Thomsen´s poetic interest is primarily concerned with aesthetic issues, a wish to shape the poem´s form, the poem´s ability to interpret the basic conditions of our lives, or the ´existentials´ as he calls them. And last, but not least, his lyrical endeavour to attain the same level as beauty: "All I am interested in is beauty, since only beauty can hold all the horror we alone can accept and equate at the aesthetical level." Above all, he wishes to perfect the form of the poem to create a beauty which is capable of embracing the chaos of our existence. Thomsen´s lyrical struggle is governed by an inner determination which will not let him rest until the poem is complete, existing as an independent entity.
 
The Absolutely Necessary
Søren Ulrik Thomsen´s ability to create rhythm, complexity and ambiguity, and to arrive at the absolute final form for his poems is, in itself, a paradox. But he succeeds, whether the poems are run-of-the-mill, poignant or highly elaborate arabesques.
   Søren Ulrik Thomsen´s poems remind us of the importance of the things we choose to forget and overlook, and gradually leave behind. They are a compelling testimonial to the irrefutable need for poetry and its cognitive importance. They underline the extent to which poetry is created as a result of an interchange with our daily lives.

 Neal Ashley Conrad Mag.art. is lecture in literature and critic.
The article was first publish in Danish Literary Magazine 10

Translated by Malene S. Madsen