Henrik Nordbrandt is a major poet, prominent not only within his own generation but among Danish poets of the entire twentieth century. The few prose books he has published are competent works; they include two volumes of essays, a political thriller, two children's books, a cookbook, and a diary, but poetry is by far the most important part of Nordbrandt's output. Taking Danish modernism of the 1960s as his point of departure, dominated as it was by elaborate metaphorical invention, he soon developed his own distinct voice, choosing freely from among the various poetic idioms that have dominated Scandinavian, European, and American poetry since the eighteenth century, combining symbolic, allegorical, and metaphorical techniques into an individualistic blend that he has made the vehicle of the joy and pain of love, the pain and joy of melancholy, and what might be called a certain metaphysics of absence.

Henrik Nordbrandt...