Pia Tafdrup is one of the finest Danish poets of the 1980s and 1990s. Her poetry collections have inspired readers and critics in Denmark and Scandinavia as well as at poetry festivals and readings all over the world. From London, Toronto, Moscow, Lahti, and Bergen to Sidney and Auckland, her poetry has been critically acclaimed. Beautifully shaped verses with intense musicality characterize Tafdrup's poetic language; her profound reflections on human existence alternate with her impressions of nature, the body, sexuality, and modern living.

The vitality of young womanhood and a consciousness of the inevitability of death form the center of Tafdrup's poetic universe. Many of her readers and critics have viewed her poetry as a liberating reaction to the feminist poetry of the 1970s, in which the subjection of women was the major theme. In Tafdrup's poems the beauty of the verse itself as well as the sensuality...