Offshore Drilling

By : Thomas Bredsdorff

In 2000 the poet Henrik Nordbrandt received the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize for Drømmebroer (Dream Bridges), this autumn sees another collection from this truly remarkable poet.

The title of Henrik Nordbrandt's new volume is taken from its last poem, a lovely little allegory on a particular manner of writing,his writing. The word Fralandsvind (offshore wind) suggests, so the poem states, that there is a certain force, invisible from the sheltered shore, to which we might succumb, were we to give in to the temptation and slide on to the calm sea beyond whose horizon the waves must be roaring. Out there, the mirror of the surface is broken and we would be doomed among glass splinters. Instead we laugh and pronounce the offshore wind from where we stand, on the beach.

   As I spell out the allegory of the substitution of words for life it tends to become straight and dull. Which is misleading, since the poem itself manages to blur the distinction between there, amidst the roaring waves, and what being there involves. This use of allegory - at once intellectually clear-cut and emotionally undecided, referring simultaneously to the act of writing and the art of living - is a hallmark of Nordbrandt's poetic diction and is to be found in several of the poems in the collection. Another felicitous specimen of the species is 'An Appeal to the Plumbers', where the feeling of pain and the clogging of the kitchen sink are beautifully intertwined.

   Another remarkable feature of Nordbrandt's diction occurring frequently in Fralandsvind (Offshore Wind) is the emotionally charged stage on which agents of archetypal stature appear in dreamlike poise, most successfully in a poem called 'Father', in which the title character is as impressive (and as fragile) as the commandant in Don Giovanni, whereas his son, the persona of the poem, is as submissive (and as overbearing) as a Strindbergian dream character. The power play among two such males is re-enacted in a rather more realistic and humorous setting in which the parts of father and son - or maybe it is the other way around - are performed by a waiter and his customer ('Waiter').

   Such male role acting makes one wonder what has happened to a staple of Nordbrandt poetry: the love poem. Except for one or two rather sardonic meditations, love is more absent here than perhaps in any of his previous collections. This might be an existential statement but, it is more likely simply to be an accidental feature of the poems that he happens to have written since last time. Of late, Nordbrandt has come to gather his poems around certain themes and mental states, most notably around the poetic investigation of grief, in Glemmesteder (Places for Forgetfulness, 1991) and Ormene ved himlens port (The Serpents at the Gate of Heaven, 1995), or the act of dreaming, in Drømmebroer (Dream Bridges, 1999), for which he was presented with the Nordic Council Award. That feature too is absent in Offshore Wind. The volume contains poems for all seasons - quite literally: virtually all the months of the year appear somewhere, not just the terrible month of November for which he was previously renowned. The volume also contains a handful of first-rate Henrik Nordbrandt.

The article was first published in Danish literary Magazine 20, autumn 2001.