Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

This is a book by a person in one of the old-fashioned connotations of the word: someone who’s really there, writing about female desire without neurosis, reservation, rejection, ambivalence or aggression: astonishing; and a book that’s all pleasure to read, beautifully translated, as if it had been giftedly written first in English, by Ann Born, herself a poet and also the translator of Karen Blixen’s Letters.

     ‘I have the present of a body - what should I do with it, so unique it is and so much mine?’ The quotation from Mandelshtam gives the spirit of this cycle of poems, where the female body and psyche are not physically or psychologically incarnated or impersonated but speak for themselves, lyrically sharing their rhythms with the cycles - moon, season, ovulation, menstruation, the flow, climaxes and ebbings of desire, the coming of childbirth, children and obliteration: ‘and without longing for the moment I when all around us has vanished I pure and beautiful as snow becoming water I when birds start to call to other birds I no continuation is possible I no elevation for birth possible.’

     At the same time Tafdrup is fully aware of the artificiality of what she’s doing: the poems are erotic but linguistically erotic: ‘poetry is a condition of language’, she quotes from another Danish poet. ‘You can hover in language…I speak I therefore I hover.’ The title poem, about the highest tide at full and new moon, is a rondo:

Spring tide
                I lie down
                bare myself
                I’ll be your animal
                for a moment
                with senses stretched out
                between neck and heel
spring tide
                my throat’s free
                and you can smell the blood beneath the skin
spring tide
                I can open myself everywhere
spring tide
                you can do what you want with me everywhere
spring tide
                I am nearer the sun everywhere
                pure drops of light
                in a growing abyss of lust.

At the same time the poems are full of love: they make no distinction between love and lust.