Peggy
A fascinating collection. The poems are precise, observant, insightful. Upon completing the book, I have looked into Danish rural life in the outskirts as keenly as if I had visited. No, more keenly, because Westergaard introduces us to a cast of characters that otherwise I would have known only superficially. Here I find people full of personality and quirkiness set in a landscape eternal as farming, but as stoical as the Danes themselves. Yet there is humor here, too, found often in the final turn of the poem. The book is organized into three sections: past, present, and future. Luckily for the reader, the past is the largest and the most descriptive. The present and future are also lovely, but in a more introspective way. One of these, "Refugee from the Homeland," has a second section that is so gorgeous I think I should copy it out by hand and doodle around it every day, letting its compression and feeling sink into my being, so that I may heed its wisdom. I highly recommend this book for all poetry lovers, There is much in it that I wish to revisit. I'm grateful to Netgalley and the publisher Matador, an imprint of Troubador, for the copy I read in exchange for a fair review.
