Queen’s Gate is the woman’s way into the world. The gate signals transformation. What does one go into? And what is left behind? 'From water you have come,' writes Pia Tafdrup, creating her own myth through a sequence of highly sensual poems centred on water in all its forms: the waterdrop, the lake, the river, the well, the sea, vital liquids, the bath, the rain, the rainbow. Water streams through poems in which images are bodied from woman to nature: meltwater rivers 'run smooth as the muscle ?bre of veins’ while a woodsnipe pecks its beak into sand ‘as quickly as a sewing machine’s needle plunges into the dress'.

Queen’s Gate is a composite picture of the basic elements of the life-cycle of nature and man, mirrored through a conceptual world that takes the body as its axis, in poetic language of great visual and emotional power. The poems are written from a female point of view, but re?ect the whole story of human life and suffering. Queen’s Gate – her ninth collection – is a con?uence of themes and threads running through all Pia Tafdrup’s previous work. It is a many-voiced and multi-layered book drawing on the same fertile sources as her earlier manifesto, Walking Over Water, but brought here to an inspirational highwater mark of poetic achievement.

Translated by: David McDuff