BUTTERFLY VALLEY: A Requiem

by Inger Chrietensen

=Famous in Europe, unknown here, Inger Christensen is a formalist

who makes her own rules, then turns the game around with another

rule." --Eliot Weinberge

"A fear of what might be and a love of what is speak eloquently

from these texts." --World Literature Today

Inger Christensen, often cited as a Nobel contender and one of

Europe s most revered poets, is perhaps best known for her

groundbraking work Det (It), a cycle of poems published in 1969.

Her first book published in the U.S, alphabet (New Directions,

2001), met with a tremendous response: =Seductive," said Boston

Review. "A visionary reincarnation of the natural wodd in the

atomic age," wrote The Chicago Review.

Butterfly Valley: A Requiem collects four medium-length

works, each startling for its beauty and formal innovation.

"Buttedly Valley" is a sonnet cycle in which the glowing colors

and beauty of butterflies ere described. In "Watersteps," the

fountains and piazzas of Rome coalesce, brought alive by the

imagination in the poem s shifting rhythms, in =Poem on Death" the

poet seeking immortality faces the whiteness of the page as the

blankness of death. And "Meeting" describes a "coming together,"

yet examines our failure to connect.