Queen's Gate

Queen’s Gate is the woman’s way into the world. The gate signals transformation. What does one go into? And what is left behind? 'From water you have come,' writes Pia Tafdrup, creating her own myth through a sequence of highly sensual poems centred on water in all its forms: the waterdrop, the lake, the river, the well, the sea, vital liquids, the bath, the rain, the rainbow. Water streams through poems in which images are bodied from woman to nature: meltwater rivers 'run smooth as the muscle fibre of veins’ while a woodsnipe pecks its beak into sand ‘as quickly as a sewing machine’s needle plunges into the dress'.