Tautly Bristling

By : Niels Lyngsø

The basic tone of Naja Marie Aidt’s first four poetry collections might be simply defined as psychological realism; the poems describe experiences from childhood and adolescence as well as from a grown-up world with (often difficult) love and family relationships. Aidt’s new collection, Rejse For En Fremmed (Journey for a Stranger) takes a big step in a different direction. It is a remarkable book with several intersecting currents. There are still specific traces of realism: the big city, trains, TV, difficult love, loneliness, desire. But there is a second current that makes use of Christian terminology and points of view (without necessarily professing them). A third current is marked by dreams or reminiscences, with lovely images of the sea, the fjords, and heath-covered landscapes. There is also a meditative current that pays particular attention to death.
   The main theme, however, is the story of Joan the Mad [Johanna in Danish], queen of Castile in the early 16th century, who was married to Philip the Handsome. After his premature death and burial, she had his body exhumed and transported through Castile to be laid to rest elsewhere. Along the way, the body had to be rescued from a burning church. The queen was imprisoned and forcibly removed from power; she was thereafter considered to be mentally disturbed. But, as Aidt mentions in a note, there is no proof that Johanna actually suffered from insanity.
   Aidt does not tell the story, the main details of which are outlined in a note; instead, she uses poetry to enter into fragments of the story:

Mad Johanna
stands below in the dark and screams.
Desperately she resounds in a warm, asphalted night.
I dream that Europe is merging into a green
and golden land, it snaps in half with a red gash.

She breaks in the hands of a beautiful man.
She throws dirt on her wound.
I will lift out my heavy heart to the northern lights,
and it will be just like them.
But we have long since melded into one.

The figure of Johanna was a great find for Aidt, who has successfully tested her admirable lyrical talent with this foreign and violent material. It seems natural that a modern woman would see her own reflection in this extraordinary woman whose character was marked by stubbornness, strong desire, and great sorrow. But these poems are not merely informed by carefully calculated mirroring. At times there is a frightening and strongly realized identification that goes deep beneath Johanna’s skin. As in the poem fragment above, it is no longer possible to tell whether Johanna, Aidt, or a third person is speaking. Characteristic of this collection are the concise perceptions, the abrupt line breaks which emphasize symmetries and contrasts, and the restlessly shifting voice.
   The various currents in the book are not separated into distinct sections but constantly alternate and blend within a single poem. The poems seem to speak with several voices at once, they interrupt themselves, and they start all over again; typical of this is the repeated use of “and” and “but.” Short sentences and fragments fall like precise blows that make the individual poem at once taut and bristling. The book as a whole presents this same extraordinary double impression. There doesn’t seem to be a single superfluous line in the 43 untitled poems; yet at the same time they bristle chaotically in all directions.
   There are sudden shifts between very short and very long lines. And there are violent leaps in tone from the sacred to the frivolous, and from a humorous to a more solemn style. The reason these leaps and shifts work so well is presumably because -- aside from a confident, jazz-like sense of rhythm -- Aidt’s poems possess an overriding energy and intensity. The poems have a noticeable effect on the reader; there is definitely something going on. What exactly this might be -- psychological, religious, existential, or something else -- is difficult to say. And that is precisely what is so exceptional: with their odd, intricate spaces of past and present, Spain and the North, death and desire, perception and meditation, these poems beg to be read over and over again.
   Rejse For En Fremmed is a bold and wholly accomplished book -- and a surprising expansion of Aidt’s lyrical work.

The smell in here, that’s what it is,
sweet apples and dead
beasts under the floor, the damp
runs yellow down the wall
and how
I slept here
in a half body, in a whole
bright expectation, but mostly like a sigh
or a shudder; that’s how it smells in this
house I love, which is still there,
but you’re not there and I
can’t see myself either,
but I’m here, straddling corpses, in the heavy
and the sweet, weeping, but I'm, here, raging,
but I’m not here.

This article first appeared in Danish Literary Magazine 17, 2000.

Translated by Tiina Nunnally