Watercolor by Beatrice Powell


Welcome to our fourth issue of The Copenhagen Review.


Last issue we added a new element, that of music, with contributions from the Danish choir Hymnia and the Danish French-singing retro band Télé Rouge (click on previous issues at the top left of this page.)

We continue this practice by bringing a selection from Denmark's distinguished pianist Christina Bjørkøe's new CD, The Complete Sonatas of Carl Nielsen, and a contribution by Welsh harper, Helen Davies: a lovely Scottish ballad from her CD, Chasing the Breeze.

Poet and experimentalist Gittan Sarah O. Pedersen contributes for the third time to TCR, with a minimalistic account of a meeting with Christina Bjørkøe.

From Berlin, we bring the poetry of Sylvia Geist, in both German and English. From Vienna, we bring you Anja Utler, in German. From Basel, English Anne Blonstein in English. From Sweden we bring two poets of the “younger generation”, Malte Persson and Sara Hålström, in Swedish and in English. From Belgrade we bring you a long poem in English by Dusan Gojkov. And from far-away California we bring you a poem by Victoria Shorr in English and Danish.

We also bring poems by two great poets who have recently passed over, if only to travel the other side, Inger Christensen, who died in January (we bring one poem in English translation) and Willum Peder Trellund, who died two years ago (we bring some poems, in Danish, that have never been published).

Poetry is not all we have.

Henriette Houth's deft pen has found a story about a visit to a Museum, which should bring a smile to the lips of many of our readers. We have translated it into English. And we bring the original Danish version as well.

And then there are some appreciations of books we feel you should know about: Aleksandar Sajin's Rosa (in Danish), a book of paintings and water colors by Denmark's celebrated artist Arne Haugen Sørensen and a novel, Starbook, by Nigerian-born Ben Okri.

We introduce you also to ANYSTOPIA. This is a new section and will include contributions about how we might make new certain things of this world. It is a forum for practicable idealism, hence the new word we have coined.

And as always, you may click into past issues at the top left-hand corner of this page.


Gordon Walmsley, editor


thanks to Magnus Falko, Heike Houben, Judyta Preis and the contributors, for various and sundry things