Merete Torp

1956 -

Denmark

Merete Torp is self-taught and through different jobs has financed her highly acclaimed writing as a poet. She made her debut at the age of fifteen in the literary magazine Hvedekorn in 1972: “Presumably the youngest, new poet Hvedekorn has ever featured”, was the comment of the editor Poul Borum. The twelve poems in Hvedekorn demonstrated a stylistic talent, seriousness, and concentration that is attentive to the unexpected elements of language.

It took ten years before Merete Torp published her first book, Digte, which was greatly admired by other 1980s poets and all connoisseurs of poetry. Digte, 1982, includes many of her poems from 1972. Typical of the poems is particularly their rhythmic certainty and unostentatious metaphors. It is often almost dead metaphors relating to light and darkness that suddenly gain expressiveness in the depiction of the first person’s experience of the existential: life, death, and love.

After a break of fourteen years, Digte II followed in 1996, which firmly established her key position. Her poetry is akin to that of Søren Ulrik Thomsen, who often refers to her poetry. Characteristic of her universe is a female first person that presents herself with powerful emotions and expressiveness in poems that are heavily tinged with surrealism, but at the same time tightly controlled. The images, rhythms, and turns of speech in her language are strangely indelible in her poems.