My Breath Into That Which It Cannot Reach

Af : Katja Pedersen

In her two collections of poetry, Katrine Marie Guldager alternates between gravity and irony, viewing life as quirky and intense, and peril as a precondition for life and love

The experience of time merely passing, and the yearning for freedom, for love, and for a language that can embrace the fleeting events and thoughts of human existence are recurrent concerns in the poems of Katrine Marie Guldager´s (b. 1966) first collection Dagene skifter Hænder (1994) (The Days Change Hands). Central here is the desire to find a voice, a poem "spun from a thousand threads,/ habitable and porous." The poem must reflect the self, be habitable, and at the same time be unfinished, imperfect. It is precisely against the background of such a poetic that Dagene skifter hænder captures and expresses the shifts in perception and mood that the poems´ implicit narrator continually experiences.

Time and mutability
Dagene skifter hænder takes as its point of departure the recognition that life and human existence are movement through time and mutability. It is for this reason that neither for the implicit narrator nor for the poem is it possible to discover any permanent meaning or even coherence. Given the whirling chaos of experience and information that constitute modern life, and given the sundering of memory into a multitude of fragments, contemporary humanity is left, in these poems, with neither tenable centre nor truth: "Most of the time I am on my way/and I do not come home/any more/this is no good" ("Denne eftermiddag") (This Afternoon). The poems do not lament the condition of homelessness, but seek instead glimpses of life and hints of identity in movement and in change of direction: "Beneath your star I am always underway/ towards something else:/ Behind me I leave a trail of overturned trains/ and days that tear themselves loose." ("Arv") (Inheritance).

A suitable language
Alternating between gravity and irony, Katrine Marie Guldager views life as quirky and intense, and peril as a precondition for life and love. It is in the space or the distance between places and things - in the transitions where nothing is completed, where "the days change hands" - that love is to be found and meanings both originate and disappear: "... All that which is neither only yours nor only mine/ but ours/ a room between two mirrors/ of which soon there will be nothing left:/ Only that which disappears in order to begin again." ("Vi er som to spejle") (We are as two mirrors). To come to terms with oneself and with the chaotic, fragile world around one, necessitates the use of language in a way that "fits". And although the narrator of the poems at times comes to doubt everything and would prefer to see herself transformed into a lying "thief/ lips moist/ with yellow words", the desire is again expressed to put "my breath into that/ which it cannot reach." In other words, what must be done is to close one´s eyes and grope towards "that which has not yet been given a name", towards that which is to be found in the transitions and which is hidden in the various layers of memory.

The disorder of moving
In her collection of prose poems, Styrt (1995) (Crash) - whose diction and themes have much in common with the Danish author Kirsten Hamman´s collection of poetry Mellem tænderne (1992) (Between the Teeth) - Katrine Marie Guldager employs a heavier armament of irony and sarcasm than was the case in Dagene skifter hænder. She attempts to navigate through reality´s unending stream of washing machines, streets, screeching seagulls, bicycles, lovers, bag lunches, telephone conversations, grocery bags, the disorder of moving, and sad cups of coffee. Despite the danger of injury, the narrators of these texts repeatedly throw themselves against brutal and incomprehensible reality in attempts to inhabit it: "I get up, and reeling with intoxication, tumble into the streets, stumble over the cry of a seagull and claim it as my own." The desire to wrest from reality a language and a place from which to speak of life as it is, and from which, in spite of everything, "something" may begin, makes itself felt once again in Styrt. But menace lurks everywhere, and language often seems "a rain of uninhabitable words, two pieces of wood that fall one to each side of the chopping block: an axe that gets stuck in the tip of a wooden shoe". ("Klippespalte") (Fissure). And it can be difficult, not to say impossible, to come to terms with life when memory "is like windows in springtime flaking and flaking off, what I remember, like the rotten frames slowly pulling away from one another". ("Vindue") (Window).

Playing with perspectives
Vivid turns of phrase, linguistic surprises and play with perspectives are some of the effects employed by Katrine Marie Guldager, when in a comic-ironic tone she offers the following, somewhat bizarre, reminders: "That´s what it´s like to have been born, there´s nothing to be done about it, once you´re born you´re born, you can´t get out of it, can´t get off, can´t be unborn again." ("Rødt") (Red). Beneath the poems´ everyday inventory, and beneath their surface of colloquialisms, clichés and irony, a more sombre and serious element is to be found, suggestive of the sense of vulnerability, fatigue and lonehness with which, on certain days, "you" are afflicted: "... most of all you feel like 17 kitchen appliances that you have neither bought nor paid for, like a tired grocery bag from the supermarket you´ve put away and then forgotten: Its hard to say how you do it, how you find your way back, among the things you can´t revive, yourself, the kitchen table, and a traffic accident that you hide under your ribs." ("Trafikulykke") (Traffic Accident).

The poem as gesture
In both Dagene skifter hænder and Styrt, the poet repeatedly treats the theme of finding a voice and of using the poem as gesture in an attempt to grasp after oneself and the world. And it is precisely in this manner that Styrt concludes when, in the last poem of the volume, Katrine Marie Guldager in a peculiarly lovely and quiet voice declares: "I don´t know what it was i wanted here, only that a dream comes slowly into focus and begins to dream itself, with no other aim than to let itself be repeated as a possibility: a dictionary that wants its pages torn out, blind earth that wants steps to vibrate under." ("Jord") (Earth).


Denne artikel blev første gang bragt i Danish Literary Magazine nr. 9, 1996

Oversat af Birgit Stephenson