Knud Sørensen

Danish author, Knud Sørensen, born in 1928, was a certified land surveyor for 28 years, during which he became intimate with the Danish agricultural landscape. Much of Sørensen’s writing conveys the mindset and culture of rural Denmark, especially in the years following WW II, when, as in countries all over the world, interdependent farming communities were inexorably replaced by agribusiness. His poetry reads almost like a historical document of this era, depicting the pride and intimacy of farmers’ work, the disillusionment and tragedy of bankruptcies, the dissolution of farming communities, and the successful transition of many farmers to new lives in urban areas. A book reviewer for 14 years, he has also written 49 books and won over 20 literary awards, including a lifetime grant from the Danish Arts Council. In 2014 he received the Grand Prize of the Danish Academy. In 2019 he was awarded the Morten Nielsen Poetry Prize.

Excerpt from “The Dream”

I want to make it simple
and easy to understand:
You start by preparing your land and afterwards you
sow. Then the sun shines and it rains and the sun shines again
and one day the green shoots come up. So you watch
the shoots grow into plants and the plants grow and
flower and set seed and the sun shines and the seed matures
and it’s time to harvest….

In this way you live until you die. Everything else is just ripples
on the surface. Dairy consolidations factories revolutions sales percentages meat cattle versus milk
cows all that is unreal. What is real is earth sun rain and the air
that is warmer in the summer than in the winter.

So simple.