*****
Pia Tafdrup is one of Denmark’s leading poets. She has published over twenty books in Danish since her first collection appeared in 1981, including widely admired sequences of themed collections. The latest of these is a series of five books focussing on the human senses, her Senses Quintet (2014-2022), which the critic Carsten Palmer Schale has called ‘a cathedral of the soul’ and ‘the best collection of poems written in Scandinavia in the past 20 years’.
Earlier this year Pia Tafdrup was the recipient of the Prince Henrik Prize:
‘Pia Tafdrup is awarded the Prince Henrik Prize 2026 for having enriched Danish literature over five decades with highly qualified, original and varied poetry that maps countless aspects of human existence. With her suggestive, perceptive and precise language and her ability to poetically grapple with the big questions of existence, Pia Tafdrup has given us poems that are both beautiful, personal and universally recognizable.’ – Prince Henrik Prize 2026 Jury citation
*****
The Sight of Light / The Sound of Clouds / The Touch of Skin by Pia Tafdrup, translated by David McDuff. £14.99. Bloodaxe. ISBN 978-1-78037-762-9. Reviewed by Gregory Woods
‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.’ This famous first line in the eighth of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese always, in my mind, conveys an image of the poet, sitting at a clerk’s desk, telling the beads on her abacus. To my ear, the sheer nerdiness of the line is what gives it its charm, and it always reminds me of my long abandoned plan to write a book about the bureaucratic impulse in literature. I think of the totalising inclusiveness of Walt Whitman’s great lists, which then send me back to the Bible’s genealogies and to that passage in the Iliad when the onward narrative drive is paused for some 250 lines to make way for a catalogue of all the armies mustered to join the warships bound for Troy. More ambitiously, Dante’s Divine Comedy is nothing if not a filing system, a huge database of moralising gossip, cataloguing and classifying all human behaviour.
I think, too, of Ko Un’s much more recent project Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives), 4001 poems in thirty volumes, recalling everyone he had encountered, or even heard of, in his lifetime. This feat of memory, or of memory-triggered supposition, makes impressive claims for itself, even if only as an aspiration. It seems implausible that a woman writer would ever don her anorak and involve herself in this kind of thing. After all, it’s worth remembering what Herman Melville says about the cetology of Moby-Dick: ‘I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty.’
Which brings us to Pia Tafdrup’s Senses Quintet (2014-2022), five volumes on each of the five senses respectively. Bloodaxe published the first two (The Taste of Steel and The Smell of Snow) in a single volume in 2021, and have now published the other three together as one. I’ve decided to come at this rather wonderful volume, perversely, by way of my initial aversion to it. Seen in a negative mood, the whole project can come across as a mere filing exercise in its systematic divisions of the senses. Each of the five collections in the Quintet is neatly divided into nine subtitled sections, most often with five or seven poems in each, with a total of exactly fifty-five poems per collection.
As an admirer of Tafdrup’s earlier translated collections Spring Tide and Queen’s Gate, but in a sceptical mood, I was disappointed at first to find, in this volume, a proliferation of both cliché and platitude. Could a book of poetry survive such built-in handicaps? For a start, every now and then, Tafdrup goes into Wikipedia mode, reeling off facts, unrefined by any ‘poetic’ trope but the division into verse-like lines. For instance, in ‘The Bells of City Hall’, she reports that the bells of Copenhagen’s city hall, cast
in Gescher in Westphalia
by Petit & Gebrüder Edelbrock, carefully chosen
from among possible foundries, have rung
since New Year’s Eve 1899-1900,
first manually, then driven by the world’s first
electromechanical clockwork
… and so forth. When a subjective, personal note is finally allowed back in, all it amounts to is the bathetic thought: ‘the bells have a good sound’. Perhaps Tafdrup is toying with the reader’s aversion to cliché, or the poetry reader’s intolerance of (what?) the evil of banality. And in her defence, I’m reminded of what André Gide said on the matter: ‘A great man [sic] has only one concern: to become as human as possible – or, better still, to become banal’ (‘On Influence in Literature,’ 1900). Tafdrup often requires herself to state the obvious, since any of us may have overlooked or forgotten it. It really is quite daring on her part to repeat, as the refrain to the final poem of her whole, five-volume sequence: ‘Everyone / is equipped with senses’.
‘Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder,’ she says at one point. Elsewhere, referring to the Covid pandemic, ‘we pass one another / like potential ticking time bombs’. These are not fresh expressions – that isn’t their point. They are characteristic, reflexive responses to particular moods and circumstances. Tafdrup seems at ease with the clichés of common expression, stating as they do both a commonality of experience and a shared manner of speech. If cliché is a matter of recognisable echoes of previously delivered phrases, it may be that all comprehensible uses of language should qualify as such – we only understand what we have read or heard before – in which case we have no reason to deplore it as a figure.
In the impressive, third poem of the sound volume, ‘Danish Daily Sounds’, Tafdrup presents a record of what she can hear during a typical day in her apartment block. An unremarkable line from a popular song (‘I can’t give you anything but love, baby’), presumably playing on many radios, serves as a refrain. It was while reading this poem that I first felt echoes of something I couldn’t put a name to; and then I could: Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose main, implied theme is the consequence of the inconsequential. Like Knausgaard, Tafdrup is addicted to the mere experience of being alive, of sensing the life of the body and mind. She looks at (and smells and tastes and touches and hears) the shared normality of the world’s strangeness with an unfiltered enthusiasm.
The range of her recorded sensory perceptions, specifically as a woman, is suitably broad. Indeed, taking the five collections as a whole, her coverage of experiences gendered by her own body and its routines across a lifetime, the sequence convincingly (if implicitly) presents Womankind as a far more representative universality than the traditions of Mankind used to manage. In one of the late poems, ‘The body feels the liquids leave it’, she works her way through a list: tears, saliva, sweat, menstrual blood, amniotic fluid, milk and urine. The omission of semen from the poem is a statement in itself, belonging among the silences she has included among her sounds. There is an implied rebuke, here, to male self-involvement; perhaps only noticed (or even invented?) by the male reader. In eventual effect, the various mappings of her senses within and around her body coalesce as a kind of Vitruvian Woman in words, an Everywoman standing in for us all. Yet she ends this crucial poem with yet another cliché:
the body feels the liquids leave it,
it’s a miracle to be alive.
Easy though it is to be snooty about this, the sentiment is as universal as its expression is common. Isn’t that the kind of achievement that Gide was getting at?
Gregory Woods is the author of six poetry collections with Carcanet Press, the most recent being An Ordinary Dog (2011) and Records of an Incitement to Silence (2021). His booklet, They Exchange Glances: Gay Modernist Poems in Translation (2024), is with Hercules Editions. His main books on gay cultural history are with Yale University Press.
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