There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die

The vibrant first volume of selected works by Danish poet and memoirist Ditlevsen (the Copenhagen Trilogy) to be published in English showcases her clever and emotionally resonant poetry. Like her confessional American contemporaries Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, Ditlevsen (1917–1976) delves into the deprivations and humiliations of mid-20th-century womanhood and heterosexual romantic love (she married and divorced four times). The title poem features a woman speaking to the young girl she once was, reflecting with melancholy on her wasted potential and how expectations differ from reality: “You had a girl’s dream of a husband and baby,/ and you got what you wanted but were still alone.” In “Marriage,” the speaker’s identity dissolves completely into her home and husband: “And I, who inhabit this house so completely,/ fertilizing the dust with a tenuous idea/ of a life that’s my own, kneeling each day/ in vague prayer next to the mop bucket’s/ yellow-enamelled, stoic fidelity.” Like Plath and Sexton, Ditlevsen died by suicide after what seems to have been a lifetime of suffering. Despite her troubled marriages and struggles with addiction, she published 30 books and was a beloved literary figure in Denmark. This wonderful collection is sure to find an appreciative new audience for her stark and captivating observations of love, loss, and disillusion. (Mar.)