The Queen's Gate

- The Danish committee's report for the 1999 Nordic Council Literature Prize

By : May Schack

Pia Tafdrup received the 1999 Nordic Council Literature Prize for Dronningeporten (The Queen´s Gate), a collection of poems which gathers the various threads of her work into a happy, united whole.

Since her literary debut in 1981 with Når der går hul på en engel (When an angel breaks her silence) Pia Tafdrup (born 1952) has written, in work that is lyrical and sure in its form, about the relation between the body and nature. Anchored in images of plants, animals and the female body, which mutually reflect one another, her writing explores the major existential themes of life and death, resence and absence, abundance and loss, reality and dream.

In 1991 Pia Tafdrup became the first woman writer in Scandinavia to publish a statement of her poetics, Over vandet går jeg (Walking over the water), about her poetic method. Her poetry is physical, sensual, with love poems centred on female desire, and poems that embrace a female life cycle of conception, birth and motherhood, which at the same time functions as an image of the process of poetic creation.

She is equally at home in classical forms like the sonnet, the free associating prose poem and the strictly controlled, traditional lyrical devices of metaphor and rhythm. Her poetry has a great aesthetic effect – like that of ‘flawlessly ringing crystal’, as one critic has put it. Her precise mastery of expressive means make it possible for her to successfully create a dimension of pathos that is missing elsewhere in modern poetry.

In Pia Tafdrup’s eight collection, Territorialsang (Territorial Song), 1994, which bears the subtitle ‘A Jerusalem Cycle’, the constant focusing on the body’s experience and reality moves over into the transcendental and religious.

The link to a greater principle, above all to nature, unfolds itself monumentally in the large-scale collection Dronningeporten (The Queen´s Gate). Its title originates, as is stated in the afterword, in the desire to create a female portal to the world. The compositional principle consists of the examination of one element, water, in all its forms and phases.

The whole collection may be read as a large-scale paraphrase of the Biblical ‘From earth you have come’ as ‘From water you have come’, as one of the poems expresses it.

In 9 sections, each containing 7 poems, poetic life is given to substances which are all related to water as the basic precondition of nature and human life. We move from drops, dew, snowflakes, ice, frozen lakes, dried-up water courses and springs to the swelling of rivers, floods, rain, thunderstorms, the sea’s waves, vital fluids such as tears, blood, semen, fetal water, mother’s milk. From the mythological juice-filled apple of Eve to the rainbow. Nature lyricism alternates with descriptions of the daily shower bath, the infant’s first bath, the dead man’s last bath.

Water becomes an immensely productive image of the process of both nature and life. The body is like a landscape, an entire planet, which is flooded, wetted, moistened, precipitated, flowing and streaming in the poems, moving from the smallest to the largest in a way that few have dared to formulate since romanticism and symbolism. The body lends images to nature, as for example when rivers of melted snow ‘run smooth as the muscle fibre of veins’. And a feminine experiential space is established when the wood-snipe pecks its beak in the sand ‘as quickly as a sewing machine’s needle plunges into the dress’, or in the recording of the ‘brittle crunch’ of the scissors as they cut open the birth canal.

The collection speaks in many tones of voice, all the way from the grand and flowing pathos of the longest poem (The sea, I), where the sea is the female I personified, the primordial womb of all things – giver and destroyer of life – through pointed irony in a poem like ‘Kiss the prince’, to elegant humour and abandon in the account of the eating of oysters as the nearest one can approach to the consumption of ‘the sea’s divine inner being’ (the poem ‘The smell’).

The Queen´s Gate is a courageous and ambitious collection, centred on water in all its forms. It represents a composite image of the basic preconditions of the life-cycle of nature and man, reflected through a female conceptual world with the body as axis, a poetic language of great visual and emotional power.

Translated by David McDuff