Will I love Alphabet?

One of the leading poets of Denmark, Christensen virtually invented proceduralism. An abecedarian poem, A to H, each section of this book is also guided by the Fibonacci number sequence that accretes as follows: 0, 1, 1, 2. 3, 5, 13, 21. Each section has as many lines as the two previous sections. 

Every time I read the book, which I assign in my classes, I am delighted by her prose style written with brilliant clarity. It names things that exist, along with the warning that the human devastation of nature will cause them not to exist. The poet… show more.

I opened this and read the first poem: apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist

That’s it! Those are the only words on the first page, stating the obvious and miraculous. There’s no full stop. And why apricot trees in particular? Maybe it’s because of the delicate beauty of the word on the tongue. We want to say the line over and over again. 

And so the collection proceeds, startling and beautiful and also frightening, as the damage we are doing to our planet moves to the fore towards the end. I love that the collection is alphabetical – another reason… show more.

It’s maybe inaccurate to describe this (not too) long poem as a society grappling with the aftermath of a war. There isn’t much grappling to be done, and it only partly exists after a war is through, to the extent a war like the one Christensen describes is ever through once it’s been started. It’s instead a litany of loss, of those things that can’t be reclaimed, which should instead be protected through the avoidance of war.