Literature and Fiction · Hardback

Water Lily of the Wreck

Norwegian title: Forlisets vannlilje

Charlotte Louise Vaillot Knudsen

With uncommon playfulness, Vaillot Knudsen combines wavy oceanography, volcanic activity, stabbing (extinct) animals, mysterious minerals, eroticism and spirited growths. An I and a you find themselves in a rocking boat, surrounded by a strange and sensuous world with jazzy soundscapes and marbled northern lights – and beyond it yet another sphere, with quivering heavenly bodies and marvellously meandering eternities.

The poems move through time and space in wild eruption, transforming and peeking out from odd angles (...) The poems are elegiac about the loss of nature, and manage to present this via a great appetite for flowers, maritime life, stones and joyful sounds (...) Throughout, the vocabulary is skewed and strange yet meaningfully heavy and concrete, in such a way that the writing both begins and ends in the joy of words. (...) The aforementioned joy of words and search for the world’s components lend a great deal of merriment to the poems.KLASSEKAMPENA sing-song journey that equips the reader with a couple of extra senses and several stimulants. Is this how words play nature?KLASSEKAMPEN, BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2021

Exalted plant life

An imaginative mix of people and plants (...) In general, the poems emphasise how the earth’s components seep through one another. (...) Botanical names and biological terms are combined with poetic empathy. The images can be more or less esoteric, and one begins to wonder what kind of creative world they spring from. Here, the sensuality that binds the self and the planet occasionally acquires magical qualities.MORGENBLADET

Poems bloom like flowers in a park

Charlotte Vaillot Knudsen invites us into an expansive poetry park that abounds in lifeforms of all shapes: here you can run free (...) The Poetry Park Knudsen creates seems to be a revival of l'art pour l'art, art as a free space where aspects of mankind, elsewhere oppressed, are given full expression. (...) I only know that the airy feeling of freedom I get from Waterlily of the Wreck is good, and has me wanting to feel it for a long time still.BLA (Bokvennen Litterær Avis)