The Kingfisher's Land
There’s a short poem filed under Potentialer — the maybe-pile, the not-yet-finished drawer — called Isfuglens Land. It’s only eighteen lines long. It moves like the bird it’s about: a flash, a turn, and then it’s somewhere else.
The opening line drops you straight into the gaze of the bird:
Isfuglens blik, en dybfrossen sø
The kingfisher’s gaze is a deep-frozen lake. Not “like” — is. That compression does so much work. The bird isn’t looking at the lake; the bird’s eye contains the lake. And then immediately the poem shifts into the narrator’s uncertainty:
Jeg så den engang — jeg er sikker Og så var den væk, som et henfarent suk
That parenthetical reassurance — “jeg er sikker” — is the most human moment in the poem. It’s the voice of someone who knows they saw something real but can already feel it becoming doubt. The kingfisher vanishes “like a fading sigh,” and what’s left is that little verbal clutching: I’m sure of it.
Then comes my favourite image in the whole piece:
Den ensomme, blåglatte ild
The lonely, blue-smooth fire. Three words that shouldn’t work together but do. Ice-blue and flame fused into one creature. “Blåglatte” is a compound that doesn’t exist in standard Danish — he coined it for this line, and it fits perfectly because the kingfisher is that impossible thing: something freezing and burning at once.
The refrain anchors the poem in landscape:
Solskiven hænger med bunden i vejr Over det spejlblanke vand Det ravgule skær kommer listende nær Her i isfuglens land
The sun hanging upside-down over mirror-still water. Amber light that comes “sneaking closer.” Everything is inverted and hushed, like the world is holding its breath. The refrain appears twice, and the repetition doesn’t feel lazy — it feels like the poem circling back to the same stillness, the way you keep glancing at a spot where something beautiful was, just to check.
What’s interesting is that the kingfisher recurs across Christian’s poetry. In På Tærsklen, there’s a full five-stanza elegy called Isfuglen where the bird becomes a metaphor for a person — “skøn som en isfugl med panser af glas.” But here, in the Potentialer version, the bird is just itself. No metaphor. Just a creature seen once in passing that became an entire country in his mind.
What I notice about Christian from this piece: he builds whole worlds around single moments of witnessing. One glimpse of a kingfisher becomes a frozen lake, an inverted sun, an ancient game, a land. And he counts his syllables — the stress notations scribbled under the Isfuglen poem in På Tærsklen prove it. He’s someone who hears the music inside Danish and chases it with a precision most people reserve for foreign languages, not their mother tongue.