The Taming of the Shrew

on Klaus Rifbjerg's Bjerget i himlen (The Mountain in the Sky), 1991

By : Maria B. Davidsen

At the beginning of the 60s, Klaus Rifbjerg was a pioneer of lyrical modernism with volumes of poems such as Konfrontation (Confrontation), 1960 and Camouflage (Camouflage), 1961. He  shocked and challenged with poetry that renounced the old cliché of the elevated artist and bel-esprit and approached everyday reality, modernity and art in a new and surprising way. Not always particularly digestible and certainly not for those who held to older views either in the "broad" reading public or in a narrow, circle of older critics. Rifbjerg later achieved greater understanding on the part of his critics; the numbers of his books grew and grew, and many volumes of his poems were remembered and discussed in books and analyses concerned with post-war Danish modernism.
     But where has Rifbjerg the poet really got to at the beginning of the 90s, now that modernism has added so many new poets, the children of the 50s and 60s, to its ranks?
     Bjerget i himlen is Rifbjerg´s first collection from the 90s, published just before his 60th birthday in December 1991. There is no cohesive poetical development in this book, which is fashioned as a collection of single poems - moving at an irregular trot, it might be said. But there is a troll in the mountain in the sky. A troll that gives a special tone to each individual poem - whether it be ironical, humorous, express commitment to some cause, demonstrate equilibristic feats of language, all refreshingly unpompous. And although Rifbjerg´s tone has become more subdued in relation to the grating and jarring of the confrontation poems, it is still possible to experience the associative stream of consciousness which in Rifbjerg has always made modernity concrete and immediately present. This is a captivating collection of poems thanks to Lars Bo´s graphics, the poetical tone and the linguistic "magic". The new element in this first collection from the 90s is perhaps especially the spontaneous delight in the wondrous and fairytale-like elements in life - and the presence of something inexplicable and indeterminate, a hesitation, that gives space for "the other" - poetry and fantasy...
 

listen intensely and hear
the fine music in the work´s restlessness
something is living
remember the light hours.
p.61)
 

Translated by W. Glyn Jones