Be Specific About Out Of Books alphabet
| Title | : | alphabet |
| Author | : | Inger Christensen |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 79 pages |
| Published | : | May 17th 2001 by New Directions (first published 1981) |
| Categories | : | Poetry. European Literature. Danish. Scandinavian Literature |
Inger Christensen
Paperback | Pages: 79 pages Rating: 4.37 | 1144 Users | 108 Reviews
Interpretation In Pursuance Of Books alphabet
Awarded the American-Scandinavian PEN Translation Prize by Michael Hamburger, Susanna Nied's translation of alphabet introduces Inger Christensen's poetry to US readers for the first time. Born in 1935, Inger Christensen is Denmark's best known poet. Her award-winning alphabet is based structurally on Fibonacci's sequence (a mathematical sequence in which each number is the sum of the two previous numbers), in combination with the alphabet. The gorgeous poetry herein reflects a complex philosophical background, yet has a visionary quality, discovering the metaphysical in the simple stuff of everyday life. In alphabet, Christensen creates a framework of psalm-like forms that unfold like expanding universes, while crystallizing both the beauty and the potential for destruction that permeate our times.Present Books During alphabet
| Original Title: | alfabet |
| ISBN: | 081121477X (ISBN13: 9780811214773) |
| Edition Language: | English |
Rating Out Of Books alphabet
Ratings: 4.37 From 1144 Users | 108 ReviewsRate Out Of Books alphabet
This is weird. At first I though this to be a book of bullshit. Then, I managed to decipher and come to like a bit of this abecedeariousness.Still, no matter what the lazy say, usage of capital letters is never overrated.Also, not everything managed to congeal into a semblance of sense, for me. It might (must!) be something I lack, and not the author. Still, so far this gets 3 stars:+1 star for the innovativeness+1 star for the brevity+1 star for the verses I liked-1 star for the lack ofI don't generally read a lot of poetry at a sitting, but I read this book almost straight through (granted, it's very short) and enjoyed it a lot. I need to read it a few more times to grasp what's actually going on, but I liked the way it gradually coalesced towards something resembling a plot, and I just generally thought it was good poetry. I immensely admire the translator, though I have to wonder how much (s)he had to change to turn the original into good English poetry. I would love to do
now the sky is a cavernwhere withered birds will rot like fallen fruit where tractionless clouds will atomise cities and eddy them slyly in flight like water through water like sand through sand even slugs with their slime-trails are porous as mirrors whose human reflections are lost just the stalk of a nettle explains leaflessly that in our despair we have made a flowerless earth sexless as chlorine
How is it possible that Danish poet Inger Christensen (1935-2009) did not win the Nobel Prize in Literature??People often use the term "world-building" when discussing fantasy novelists, e.g., J. R. R. Tolkien or Ursula K. Le Guin. Alphabet, though a work of verse rather than prose, is a tremendous achievement in world-building. Guided by a fertile blend of mathematical and grammatical principles, Christensen uses this book's slim 67-page length to construct an astonishingly intricate world from
Alphabet was a lot more approachable than a lot of the other books we've have been reading lately. I appreciated the simple language and predictable form as compared to the other books which seemed to try to shock the reader in every possible way - and not always in successful ways. That said, it was a fairly constraining form which would have been made even more difficult given that it was a translation. It would be interesting to see how much the work changed in the different steps of
I let loose a gentle, marveling "Oh, shit" as I started this book. As in, "Is she really going to...?" I only read the back cover later, detailing Christensen's use of the Fibonacci sequence as a structure for the book, but you don't need to know the precise mathematical formula going into this. The febrile fugue of natural history that alights on each letter of the first half of the alphabet (until "n"--infinity) is so clearly a spiral. Some books of poems charge forward relentlessly, and do it
I read Inger Christensen's Alfabet as part of my graduate reading list, in part as a study in form and in part because it is a great example of ecocritical poetry. I am amazed at her use of the Fibonacci sequence to structure the poem. Far from being a randomly imposed, kitschy constraint, the Fibonacci numbers draw attention to an overarching thematic element of the poem: namely, that true structure and order are found in nature (the Fibonacci numbers manifest themselves in the branching of
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