Flowers of Ice and Fire
By : Anne-Marie Mai
Fear in Thomas Bobergīs poems has a different origin than the idea of death; its origin is the poem and poetry itself.
"The Nordic winter has bathed our Nordic roots," writes Thomas Boberg in a verse of his new, seventh poetry collection Marionetdrømme, and it is in fact a Nordic theme that plays an important role in this new work.
Thomas Boberg, who was born in 1960 and first published in 1984, has frequently shown a prefenrence for hot, foreign latitudes as the setting for his poems. His poetry came into being in his encounter with both a foreign geography and foreign poetry - with Spain and Spanish-language surrealism, among others.
Even Bobergīs first collection Hvæsende på mit øjekast (Hissing on My Eye) 1984, ends in a southern universe of dust and heat, a place so distant from the Nordic world the poet came from, that the oblivion, namelessness, death and dream that exist in the self can be written out as poetry. In that strange universe the poet catches tip with the unknown and unformulated in himself. "By the time I reached the southern , mountains/ I had caught up with myself," run two lines from Thomas Bobergīs first collection. While confrontation with the strange and unknown in the self and the worlds were an important stumbling block in Bobergīs earlier books, recalling a Nordic world has become central to the new collection.
Psychological frost
Marionetdrømme moves between a Nordic landscape of cold and winter, and a hot southern latitude, not only in a geographical and physical sense, but in the verse and imagery of every single poem. The movement is neither free nor happy, and it leads to no homecoming or reconcilation; it is more of a
pressure within the poetry itself, a movement inward towards, and emanating from, a pitch-dark zero point. "Zero" is the name given by Boberg to the very first poem in the collection,where the poem is metaphorically described as "a redhot zero", which throws off sights, sounds and darkness. And the concept of the zero point is repeated in the final poem in the collection, "Seven minus seven degrees", which describes how the poet feels that poetically and psychologically he has moved seven degrees forward in his universe, while physically and geographically he has moved seven degrees backward on the globe.
"...I had reached a point where two opposing / movements collide and neutralize each other, and now it was/ cold, deep winter here and deathsinging in the high tension/ pylons. Seven minus seven degrees make zero..."
- as the collectionīs closing poem puts it. The cold, the depth and the winter are called forth as a base and a creative stratum of meaning for the poetry. Winter and the psychological frost become a plant in these lines:
"
the crystalline patterns of ice-riven roots/ resemble the fleeting image of eternity/ here where we move from flowering to fading
"
- from the poem "Ice fantasy"
Freezing space
Thus Puppet Dreams is a work in which Thomas Boberg both witnesses and reflects on the elements and strata of meaning in his poetry. Ice and fire, heat and cold, light and darkness wrestle with each other in a continous creation, but a creation with a constant eye for its vanishing point, the poemīs red-hot zero. In this creation meanings and metaphors take over the verses, and the self can appear as a puppet, wriggling on the strings of poetry.
In the major poem of the collection, "Fragments of my puppetīs confessions", the self of the poem is forced into "...a writhing/ a kind of dance among all the shadows/ split up inside my mind". The puppet of the self is controlled by the logic of the metaphors, and every attempt at liberation merely leads the self further and further into the freezing space of the poems.
"This place is clammy, dark. A grave./ I am the sinking/ puppet laid on ice by its master/ or I am the master, deserted by his/ puppet?/But the overheated stick, held/ by a hand, feverishly/ scratching for a sign of life."
A puppet
"Fragments of my puppetīs confessions" recalls the German romantic poet Heinrich von Meistīs philosophical dialogue "On the puppet theatre", 1810. In it Meist applauds the unreflective puppet as one which, unlike a human being, can perfect art and bestow divinity on it. With Boberg we see the artist in the hands of a controlling and guiding absence, perfecting itself in the poemīs imagery, contrary to will, consciousness and intention. This absence reveals the shadow of its presence or sets its mark on each and every poem. Kleistīs romantic yearning for an art of tenderness and innocence, free from reflection, is replaced in Boberg by a late-modernist, painful experience of and reflection on art as an inevitable creation which must constantly complete itself in absence and disappearance. This a is "Given by a nobody/ this capricious absentee/ with the jokerīs gleam in his eye."
Bobergīs readers have often seen darkness and fear permeating his verses, as when a love poem in the very first collection shapes itself into a vision of the skeleton of the object of love. The great, nightmarish fear that expresses itself in Puppet Dreams has a different origin than the idea of death; its origin is the poem and poetry itself. The world of consummation, but also of absence.
The consistency with which Boberg projects his world and its boundaries is both impressive and frightening.
Flowers of ice and fire bloom in his world and the cold of the North has given his poems a biting edge both in thought and feeling.
This article first appeared in Danish Literary Magazine no. 2, 1992.
Translated by Patricia Crampton
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