Mødesteder: Om Tomas Tranströmers & Henrik Nordbrandts poesi by Louise Mønster (review)

When the late Tomas Tranströmer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011, the committee explained their decision by stating that the poet, “through his condensed, translucent images … gives us fresh access to reality” (The Nobel Foundation, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2011/). In her second monograph Mødesteder, Louise Mønster, Associate Professor at Aalborg University, investigates one of the areas in which Tranströmer’s poetry has the potential to renew and broaden the reader’s conception of the world: the way he uses places in his poetry. In true comparative fashion, Mønster complements Tranströmer’s texts with those of Danish Henrik Nordbrandt, a pairing that proves extraordinarily fruitful over the course of the study.

In keeping with the promise of the title, Mønster identifies a number of iconic topoi—in the figurative as well as in the etymological sense of the word, that is, “place”—as recurring motifs in the two poets’ works, and traces the different ways in which these places function in their poetic context. Analyzing a considerable number of the two writers’ poems (with Nordbrandt being by far the more prolific poet), Mønster moves from walls, to houses, to streets and squares, to trains and train stations, ending with the ocean and the forest. Over the course of this analytical journey, she uncovers the stories hiding in these places—stories that challenge our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.

In recent years, there has been a surge in scholarship concerning the interplay of literature and place. This is especially true for Scandinavian Studies, and Danish scholars like Martin Zerlang, Anne-Marie Mai, and Dan Ringgaard have been at the forefront of this development. In keeping with the interdisciplinary nature of the field in which Mønster inscribes herself, she draws on work by an eclectic group of theorists for her analyses, from Martin Heidegger to sociologist and cultural philosopher Michel de Certeau, and Norwegian architect and critic Christian Norberg-Schulz. As most of the earlier work on place in literature has focused on novels, Mønster’s investigation is a pioneering effort with its focus on poetry, and constitutes a valuable addition both to scholarship on Tranströmer and Nordbrandt, as well as to the burgeoning field of place studies.

Mønster’s approach is a structured one, which helps her in achieving her goal of contrasting the two acclaimed poets’ approaches to the places in question. Mødesteder opens with a detailed and thorough, yet discerningly curated, overview of the main theorists of place, from philosophers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Edward Casey to humanistic and postmodern geographers and architectural critics. Five thematic chapters follow this introduction, each encircling the place in question from a more general perspective first, before moving on to an in-depth analysis of relevant texts by each of the two writers in turn. Thanks to Mønster’s great analytical incisiveness and verbal virtuosity, this somewhat rigid structure does not feel contrived at all, but rather comes alive with her profound knowledge of the two poets’ works and nuanced application of the theoretical texts of choice.

Strewn throughout the book are historical tidbits, situating the poems and the way they portray places within a larger societal and literary context. One example of this is the “Lille stations- og toghistorie” [brief station and rail history] in chapter 5, which gives an overview of how the topos of the train station has evolved in Scandinavian modernist poetry. The train station, Mønster argues, is one of the quintessential places of modernity and therefore of modernist poetry, it is in fact “den industrielle revolutions … katedral” (p. 103) [the cathedral of the industrial revolution]. Parallel to these positive connotations, though, train stations have served as symbols of the negative aspects of modernity, its mechanization of society and inhumane acceleration of life. Tranströmer and Nordbrandt, Mønster demonstrates, incorporate both of these...