A Streetcar Named Dream

By : Thomas Bredsdorff

The title of Henrik Nordbrandt´s new volume of poetry - Drømmebroer (Dream Bridges) - suggests communication, even communion. That is what dreams and bridges are usually for.
    Not so here. The speaker of the poems reverts to his childhood only to emphasize the distance in time and place. The ageing persona is able to visualize scenes from his early life exactly because they are gone forever and cannot be brought back to life.
    For over three decades and more than twenty volumes the view from a distance has been the hallmark of Nordbrandt´s poetry. His eerie propensity for being absent while present and viceversa has produced beautiful poems, love poems in particular. This time he has couched his special point of view in childhood memories.
    One of the recurrent signs in the new volume is a streetcar. What is the significance of such an outdated vehicle when appearing in a dream? Journey and death, the psychoanalyst suggests; atonement and liberation, the astrologer claims. The persona of the poem rejects both. The monstrous vehicle, reeling through suburban streets, full of dead bodies, to him is a sign that wherever he goes he has been before. As he has thought, by the way, ever since he was born. Childhood is no Camelot of nostalgia, just another nowhere, suited to symbolize any nowhere that man can possibly arrive at. Real life is a dream, dreams are real, "was life really real / or rather something we remember from a matinTe".
    While such balancing acts on the borderline between dreams and reality may seem rather universal, the merging of childhood memories, dream images and love poetry is uniquely Nordbrandt - and of extraordinary poetic quality. In a dream the persona is visited by the pawnbroker who cuts out one part of his body after another to make up for his debts. The last but one is his eye, the last one his heart: ´The pain was the worst I ever experienced, a pain you wouldn´t believe you could feel in a dream. It hurt as much as when I think of you and get overwhelmed by a mad, sick jealousy, directed at nobody´.
    Sickening love, yes, but also love that cures all diseases, including the disease of all-pervading absenteeism:
"My eyes met with a pair of eyes / that saw me / where I have never been. / And the heavy eyelids were lowered / in order that a light without sources / could bring all the world´s sources to light."
    Dream Bridges shows Henrik Nordbrandt in full command of his poetic skills at their best, teasing paradoxes, allegories of life and love, and first and last an almost uncanny ability to transform pain into poetry.

Thomas Bredsdorff is Professor in Nordic Literature with the University of Copenhagen and has published a number of books among those In Other Words - Concerning Henrik Nordbrandts Poetic Language. He also works as a reviewer with the newspaper Politiken.

This article was first published in Danish Literary Magazine 14, 1998.