Das Schmetterlingstal. Ein Requiem

The Butterfly Valley is a masterpiece of European poetry. It contains a classic crown of sonnets with fourteen sonnets and a concluding master sonnet. Christensen's Requiem takes us back to a "land of childhood," unfolding a "symmetry of sorrow" in a play of childlike transformations, "the sorrow that has overtaken my life." It seeks to "name the butterflies as souls and summer faces of the vanished dead." Here, as in all of the poet's texts, it is impossible to distinguish what reality has taught us to separate - but which reality -: reality and imagination, fact and fiction, waking and dream, chronicle and fairy tale.