Inheritance

Whether it’s a butterfly “kicking off its cocoon,” larks singing “across flat farm country,” a dawn that “kneels in the grass / quenching its thirst / in the damp footprints of night,” or the poet’s own “urge to be a squirrel,” the poems in Cecil Bødker’s Inheritance are grounded in the physical world and transformed by her alert and always surprising imagination.  Michael Goldman’s faithful translations bring us nearly four decades of this Danish poet’s work—equalling both its subtle music and astonishing clarity.