This poem appeared in a poetry collection titled Worms at the Gate of Heaven (Ormene ved himlens port) in 1995, four years following a deep personal tragedy in Henrik Nordbrandt’s life that had an indelible impact on his poetics. Nordbrandt had married and divorced twice by the time he met Ingrid, a woman 18 years his junior.

According to Nordbrandt’s biographer, scholar Thomas Bredsdorff, Nordbrandt had planned to settle down with his love, culminating a life of wanderlust among various Mediterranean countries. But Ingrid died suddenly of thrombosis at age 28, turning Nordbrandt’s world upside down. Four years following her death, he still clearly was working through the loss in the poems of this collection, the highlight of which is Catamaran.

The poem features Nordbrandt’s signature theme of absence serving as a precondition for presence, but as Bredsdorff points out, this poem “seemed, for the first time, to turn ‘absence’ from an aesthetic and philosophical category into an existential one” (Bredsdorff 315).

In the poem, the speaker recalls a trivial argument he once had with his beloved, who had insisted that a large black object in the water was a catamaran. When the speaker later travels alone over the object in a plane and discovers it is not, in fact, a catamaran, he makes a note to call and tell her. But when he calls, she does not answer.

The poem’s most understated and powerful line blends the banal—a failure to answer the phone—with the existential: “You didn’t pick up, I later learned, / because you had died some hours before.” The poem concludes with the speaker once again flying over the object that is not a catamaran, and the speaker’s tone underscores his loss in an ironic, unsentimental way: “I wanted the plane to go down, but it wouldn’t. / You and your catamaran!”

In this poem, the initial absence of the speaker’s lover from the plane, when he first discovers that the catamaran is not a catamaran, ironically makes him feel her presence more strongly. As deeply connected lovers often do, he writes this observation down on a list of many things to share with her when they communicate next. Then, even when her sudden death makes such communication impossible, it ironically makes the poem possible; her permanent physical absence from the speaker’s life results in a poignant form of communication that immortalizes a moment that once seemed quite trivial.

This kind of ironic tension pervades much of Nordbrandt’s poetry. While the body of Nordbrandt’s poetry reveals a deep cynicism about whether lasting love is possible in the real world, Nordbrandt makes it clear in this poem that love, in all of its collected trivial moments, is immortal in poetry.

Bibliography

Bredsdorff, Thomas. “Henrik Nordbrandt.” In Twentieth-Century Danish Writers. Edited by Marianne Stecher-Hansen. Detroit: Gale Group, 1999, 311–316.
Nordbrandt, Henrik. The Hangman’s Lament: Poems, A Bilingual Edition. Translated by Thom Satterlee. Los Angeles: Green Integer 95, 2003.

Categories: British Literature, Literature

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