Inger Christensen (1935-2009) è una figura centrale nella poesia danese del Novecento, con una produzione che le è valsa più volte la candidatura al Nobel per la letteratura e di cui 'La valle delle farfalle', sua ultima opera, è considerata il vertice. Finora inedita in italiano, è presentata nella traduzione firmata da Bruno Berni, che con Inger Christensen ha intrecciato un fitto dialogo proprio sulle scelte e la lavorazione di questa versione. Ad accompagnare 'La valle delle farfalle', un altro componimento della scrittrice danese, la 'Poesia sulla morte'.

Mantegna e Marsilio sono innamorati della stessa donna. Sullo sfondo dei lavori per la Camera degli Sposi, questo amore disperato alla fine li avvicinerà. Un romanzo le cui tinte sono le stesse dell'affresco della celebre stanza mantovana.

Light, Grass, and Letter in April is the first book in English to appear since the great Danish poet's death in January 2009. Light (1962) and Grass (1963), her first published works, introduce her genius for the music of everyday speech, and her approaches to the themes she'd pursue throughout her life: the primacy of nature, the enigmatic boundaries between the self and the other, and the role of language as a mediator between human experience and reality. Letter in April (1979), Christensen's most intimate book, examines love and loss, self and loss of self, echoing musical structures developed by the French composer Olivier Messiaen. It was written in collaboration with the Danish artist Johanne Foss, whose accompanying drawings helped to catalyze the poems.

A kind of logic puzzle or house of mirrors, Azorno concerns five women, and then two men: Sampel, a writer, and Azorno, the main character of his novel. All the women are pregnant by Sampel, but which of them is really the narrator of this novel we're reading? Has someone been killed? Is someone insane? Is the whole story part of Sampel's book - or of Inger Christensen's?
Reminiscent of the brilliant style and haunting mystery of Samuel Beckett's works, Azorno illuminates the prevailing theme of Inger Christensen's great body of poetry and fiction: the interplay of perception, language, and reality. As Christensen herself wrote: 'I have attempted to tell about a world that does not exist in order to make it exist.' Ending with the struggle between two merged characters, Azorno simultaneously satisfies and unsettles, leaving us with a view of reality unlike any other.

it is the masterwork by Danish poet Inger Christensen ('a true singer of the syllables,' said C. D. Wright), often cited as a Nobel contender and one of Europe's most revered poets. On its publication in 1969, it took Denmark by storm, winning critical praise and becoming a huge popular favorite. Translated into many languages, it won international acclaim and is now a classic of modern Scandinavian poetry.

it is both a collection of poems and a single poetic epic, forming a philosophical statement on the nature of language, perception, and reality. The subject matter, though, is down to earth: amoebas, stones, and factories; fear, sea urchins, and mental institutions; sand, sexuality, and song. The words and images of it recur in ways reminiscent of Christensen's other works, but here is a younger poetry, wilder, and crackling with energy. The marvelous and complex use of mathematical structure in it is faithfully captured in Susanna Nied's English translation, which won a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award.

Butterfly Valley: A Requiem collects four medium-length works. 'Butterfly Valley' is a sonnet cycle which describes the glowing color and beauty of butterflies, and also their fragility and mortality. Memory is uncovered in the poem like the fluttering of their wings. In 'Watersteps,' the fountains and piazzas of Rome coalesce, brought alive in the imagination by the poem's shifting rhythms, lines, and overall structure. In 'Poem on Death' the poet seeking immortality faces the whiteness of the page as the blankness of death. 'Meeting,' written in extended sections, describes a 'coming together,' yet examines our failure to connect and the ability of language to overcome this.

Awarded the American-Scandinavian PEN Translation Prize by Michael Hamburger, Susanna Nied's translation of alphabet introduces Inger Christensen's poetry to US readers for the first time. Born in 1935, Inger Christensen is Denmark's best known poet. Her award-winning alphabet is based structurally on Fibonacci's sequence (a mathematical sequence in which each number is the sum of the two previous numbers), in combination with the alphabet. The gorgeous poetry herein reflects a complex philosophical background, yet has a visionary quality, discovering the metaphysical in the simple stuff of everyday life. In alphabet, Christensen creates a framework of psalm-like forms that unfold like expanding universes, while crystallizing both the beauty and the potential for destruction that permeate our times.