Guiding stars

Ten poets from one hundred years

Ledestjerner contains ten chapters on a number of the most important Danish poets from the last hundred years. It is partly about poets who have been role models for generations of poets, such as Thorkild Bjørnvig, Klaus Rifbjerg and Henrik Nordbrandt, and partly about poets who have enlightened the literary public for a short period as shooting stars, such as Emil Bønnelycke, Bo Green Jensen and Yahya Hassan.
Within each of the ten authorships, a number of texts are read closely, which lead to and are brought into connection with discussions of major literary historical currents such as romanticism, symbolism, modernism, the long poem tradition, concretism and interaction poetry or aesthetic, philosophical, psychological or sociological theories about migration, ecology , gender, artistic quality, the grotesque and the hideous.
Finally, the ten works illuminate the great existential questions of love, anxiety, longing, sexuality, nature, religion and science in a way that only poetry with its unique, ambivalent and nuanced language is capable of.

CONTENTS

1. Emil Bønnelycke
Poetic quality as a historical or universal phenomenon

2. Thorkild Bjørnvig
Sacred provisionality, metropolitan criticism and ecology

3. Klaus Rifbjerg
Psychological bullet digging and social criticism

4. Wagon Steen
The concretist experimentarium

5. Jørgen Leth
Between romantic inspiration and postmodernist construction

6. Pia Tafdrup
Body, gender and poetic metaphysics

7. Bo Green Jensen
Unity experience and idiosyncrasy

8. Henrik Nordbrandt
Between symbolism and grotesque satire

9. Klaus Høeck
Enthusiasm for technology, holistic Christianity, ecocriticism and eclectic poetics

10. Yahya Hassan:
Interaction and migration poetry, the oral long poem and the social and media contexts

About Dreams and Dialogues (2009):
Stein Larsen is one of the few researchers in Danish literature who is more or less familiar with poetry and has spent most of his working life in this field of text. And it can be seen. Dreams and Dialogues contains an extraordinarily large amount of knowledge that has been translated into an easily accessible publication.
(Susanne Kemp in Spring)

About the poetics of the night sky (2011):
With the poetics of the Night Sky, Peter Stein Larsen distinguishes himself as his generation's sharpest and most consistent reader of poetry. He has accomplished his goal of penetrating deeply into the lyrical worlds of the poets with great skill.
(Svend writes in Kristeligt Dagblad)

A good and stimulating journey through Nordic poetry. High professional class and friendly voice towards the reader (Torben Brostrøm in Information)

Stein Larsen writes with nerve and commitment [...] In the middle of the learned reasonings, you always feel in him an indivisible joy in the art of words and an ability to let this joy spread. [...] As always, exciting and intense readings of poetry emerge from Stein Larsen's analyses, and the impression that Danish literature has never been as narrowly national as conservative canon builders would like to convince us is confirmed. (Steen Klitgaard Povlsen in Standard)

On the expansion of Poetry (2015):
It is just to be happy about such an easy-to-read and informed presentation of contemporary poetry as represented by Stein Larsen in the optimistic expansion of Poetry. (Henning Howlid Wärp in Edda)

About Lyrical Lines (2018):
A theoretically well-informed and analytically well-qualified introduction to significant currents in poetry. It is highly recommended to take the time to get all the intermediate calculations with you and thus be inspired for further reading as well as research. (Jacob Ølgaard Nyboe in Edda)