Luz ; Hierba

Lys (1962) and Graes (1963) are Inger Christensen's first two poetry books. They were written by a poet who was not yet thirty years old, and yet they are not works of youth. In them they already appear the demanding and experimental themes and forms that will run through the rest of her production, and that will make her one of the greatest European poets of the 20th century: the almost pantheistic identification with the landscapes and wild nature of Denmark ; her obsession to find, beneath ordinary grammar, a total language capable of communicating with all beings, animate and inanimate, visible and invisible, that inhabit the world; and the need to unite music, poetry, visual arts, and mathematics into one whole. Because in these books the presence of the shapes, colors and strokes of Chagall, Picasso, Pollock or Jorn, the painters she loved and who forged part of her imagination, is constant. But so is music, from liturgical to the sounds of everyday life. The importance of the musical is so great that, in her first recitals, Christensen sang some of these poems accompanied by avant-garde music.