Born in 1962, Annemette Kure Andersen is a poet, translator, and editor (from 1996- 2001) of the important Danish journal, Hvedekorn (Wheatgrains), a journal of poems and graphics. She was born at Ribe in South Jutland and moved to Århus in order to study at the university there, where her major was Italian literature.
Kure Andersen published her first poems in 1991 in the volume Dicentra spectabilis, an immensely concentrated collection of extremely short poems. In contrast to many of her fellow poets of the 1990s, she consistently has cultivated and perfected a short form closely allied to the Japanese haiku. Both in her first book and in the following collection, Espalier (1993), she makes consistent use of repetition and pause, focusing on the white space of the paper as a concrete place in which to take a sensual inventory of the world. The poems take “whiteness” as a theme both as a textual reality and as symbolically linked to snow and silence. For Kure Andersen, the poetic ideal is to create poetry that serves as a monument to whiteness.
Through her strict preoccupation with the language of poetry, she aims for the poem to stand as a hyper-concentrated proof of existence—a sign of presence in the world. She once said that “the poem is an anchor thrown out into life.”
With Italian as her second language, she has spent long periods in Italy, and living there as explored its landscapes, nature, and the distinctive Italian light within her poetry. She has translated two Italian poets, Valerio Magrelli and Giuseppe Ungaretti, into Danish.
In her third collection of poetry, Tidehverv (Watershed) of 1996, she follows up one of her main themes, time and dimensionality of time. The poems in this volume involved the constant duality of living in time and of being able to escape from it through the capacity of the poet to capture and point up the moment.
Her fourth collection, Epifanier (Ephiphanies) of 1997 is the high point to date of Kure Andersen’s poetry. In this she sets out to explore French towns and scenery. The reader becomes attuned to a meditative peace and clarity in these poems. Every work in the book is a silent summons to stop and think, to make room for sense perception in order to discover new relationships between life and language.
More recent collections include Fraktur (2000) and Dokument (2001).
BOOKS OF POETRY:
Dicentra spectabilis (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1991); Espalier (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1993); Tidehverv (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1996); Epifanier (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1997); Fraktur (Copenhagen: Borgen, 2000); Dokument (Copenhagen: Borgen, 2001).
