To the Most Beautiful

Just like her second poetry collection Golden Delicious (2002), Mette Moestrup’s first solo publication in seven years - To the Most Beautiful – revolves around apples and muses. The ‘beautiful’ title sounds alluring but it is also the inscription on an apple Eris, the Goddess of Strife, threw amongst divine guests at a wedding to which she was not invited. With war as a result. The ‘Apple of Discord’ mutates throughout Moestrup’s poetry. For here reign blood apples, crab-apples – veritable mounds of apples. The 117 poems, thirteen for each of the nine muses, explore poetic systems, invent rituals and create fusions across a palette of contrasts: between love and hate, grief and joy, past and future - whilst at the same time an ‘I persona’ tries to solve the profound riddle: what is beautiful, more beautiful, the most beautiful?

About the author 

Mette Moestrup (b. 1969) made her poetry debut with Tattoos (1998) and has since published Golden Delicious (2002), King Size (2006); the novel-collage Demolished (2009) and Die, Lie, Die (2012). In 2014, she created the collage-book Free Weave along with Naja Marie Aidt and Line Knutzon, and from this collective poetic space sprang the Omina poetry collection, which she wrote with Naja Marie Aidt (2016) Mette Moestrup has also published children’s books, is a part of the performance duo She’s A Show, and has taught at various writing courses in Scandinavia. She has won the Montana Literature Prize, the Aarestrup Medal and the Beatrice Prize

Text translated by Paul Larkin