Inger Christensen

A young English girl encounters a disturbing restless spirit which she doesn't understand but knows she can put to rest.

"Butterfly Valley: A Requiem collects four medium-length works. "Butterfly Valley" is a sonnet cycle which describes the glowing color and beauty of butterflies, and also their fragility and mortality. Memory is uncovered in the poem like the fluttering of their wings. In "Watersteps," the fountains and piazzas of Rome coalesce, brought alive in the imagination by the poem's shifting rhythms, lines, and overall structure. In "Poem on Death" the poet seeking immortality faces the whiteness of the page as the blankness of death. "Meeting," written in extended sections, describes a "coming together," yet examines our failure to connect and the ability of language to overcome this."--BOOK JACKET.

"[Christensen] formulates with increasing clarity the basis of her approach to writing, and provides insights into how she composed specific poetry volumes. Some essays are autobiographical (with memories of Christensen's school years during the Nazi occupation of Denmark), and others are political, touching on the Cold War and Chernobyl. The Condition of Secrecy also covers the Ars Poetica of Lu Chi (261-303 CE); William Blake and Isaac Newton; and such topics as randomness as a universal force and the role of the writer as an agent of social change"--Publisher's description.

"In Alphabet, Christensen creates a framework of psalm-like forms that unfold like expanding universes, crystallising into words both the beauty and the potential for destruction that permeate our world and our times."--Jacket.

In 20th century literature, a kind of fiction has come much to the fore where the narrator discusses his own craft and frequently addresses the reader. However, Laurence Sterneʼs Tristram Shandy may serve as a striking example of the fact that metafiction is no modern phenomenon. Metafiction has been criticized for solipsism and regarded as a final proof of ʼthe novel no longer novelʼ. Discussing works of three contemporary novelists, Nobokov, Barth and Beckett, and Sterneʼs eighteenth century novel, the author argues that with their tricks, parodies and humour (humor) the metafictionists are concerned with a central human problem: communication. Should literature entertain, come up with ideas about the meaning of existence or give the reader a purely aesthetic experience? The four novelists examined in this study give different and rather exciting answers to these questions and to the problem of bringing their intentions across to the reader. Book cover.