Nicolaj Stochholm

Traditional and completely new

By Thomas Bredsdorff

Nicolaj Stochholm belongs to a long tradition extending from Romanticism through Eliot and his ilk into early Modernism. A tradition in which poets abandon accepted syntax and sense impressions in order to penetrate into a divided but both timeless and individual ego that is ”stretched out between four horses / each making for its own corner of the world”, a situation which, as is only reasonable, casts at least four shadows.

We are in no doubt that we are here faced with a poet, even when the codes are so private that they cannot be broken by strangers. It is the language that convinces us of the quality. Even in the less successful poems there is rarely a cliché, but almost always a clear determination to find an original expression. It is not an empty phrase when he maintains in one poem that “analogy is dead” and “mimesis used up”. He wants to get beyond both metaphor and reflected reality.

Take one of the more easily understood verses: “I have walked a hole / in myself, a clearing / storms through me”. “You can’t say” that sort of thing, but when it is said, it is poetry. What happens to the poet who has had a hole worn in him in this way? - “I’m as trembling / as the unremembering”. Again, remarkable language in both senses of the word: strange and noteworthy. One of the many poems about writing poetry contains the words, “As though we are driven to bear / a developer with which / heaven makes never a picture”. That developer can be felt in Stochholm’s language throughout, even where neither heaven nor the reader can make pictures of it.

Translated by Glyn Jones