Queen's Gate
Published on 29. November 2001
Book
Paperback/Softback
160 pages
978-1-85224-567-2 (ISBN)
Description
Queen's Gate is the woman's way into the world. The gate signals transformation. What does one go into? And what is left behind? 'From water you have come,' writes Pia Tafdrup, creating her own myth through a sequence of highly sensual poems centred on water in all its forms: the waterdrop, the lake, the river, the well, the sea, vital liquids, the bath, the rain, the rainbow. Water streams through poems in which images are bodied from woman to nature: meltwater rivers 'run smooth as the muscle ?bre of veins' while a woodsnipe pecks its beak into sand 'as quickly as a sewing machine's needle plunges into the dress'.
Queen's Gate is a composite picture of the basic elements of the life-cycle of nature and man, mirrored through a conceptual world that takes the body as its axis, in poetic language of great visual and emotional power. The poems are written from a female point of view, but re?ect the whole story of human life and suffering. Queen's Gate - her ninth collection - is a con?uence of themes and threads running through all Pia Tafdrup's previous work. It is a many-voiced and multi-layered book drawing on the same fertile sources as her earlier manifesto, Walking Over Water, but brought here to an inspirational highwater mark of poetic achievement.
Queen's Gate is a composite picture of the basic elements of the life-cycle of nature and man, mirrored through a conceptual world that takes the body as its axis, in poetic language of great visual and emotional power. The poems are written from a female point of view, but re?ect the whole story of human life and suffering. Queen's Gate - her ninth collection - is a con?uence of themes and threads running through all Pia Tafdrup's previous work. It is a many-voiced and multi-layered book drawing on the same fertile sources as her earlier manifesto, Walking Over Water, but brought here to an inspirational highwater mark of poetic achievement.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 215 mm
Width: 141 mm
Thickness: 10 mm
Weight
204 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-85224-567-2 (9781852245672)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Pia Tafdrup was born in 1952 in Copenhagen. She has published over 20 books in Danish since her first collection appeared in 1981, and her work has been translated into many languages. Her fourth collection, Spring Tide, was published in English by Forest in 1989. In 1991 she published a celebrated statement of her poetics, Walking Over Water. She received the 1999 Nordic Council Literature Prize - Scandinavia's most prestigious literary award - for Queen's Gate, which was published in David McDuff's English translation by Bloodaxe in 2001. Also in 2001, she was appointed a Knight of the Order of Dannebrog, and in 2006 she received the Nordic Prize from the Swedish Academy. Most of Pia Tafdrup's poetry collections have been linked by themes, including The Salamander Quartet (2002-2012). Written over ten years, its ?rst two parts were The Whales in Paris and Tarkovsky's Horses, translated by David McDuff and published by Bloodaxe in 2010 as Tarkovsky's Horses and other poems. This was followed in 2015 by Salamander Sun and other poems, McDuff's translation of The Migrant Bird's Compass and Salamander Sun, the third and fourth parts of the quartet. The first two collections in Pia Tafdrup's new series of books focussing on the human senses are The Taste of Steel and The Smell of Snow, which Bloodaxe published as one volume in David McDuff's translation in 2021.