Samme artikel som artiklen i European Journal of Scandinavian Studies

The poetic voice in the Danish poet Inger Christensen's book of poems alphabet from 1981 is a prophetic voice. Since the Old Testament prophets, the prophetic voice has been characterized by a 'retroprospective' temporal structure: it jumps forward to a future disaster and backward from the fictional future to the present political facts. In Inger Christensen's words, the prophetic voice talks about a world bathed in the whitewashed, godforsaken light of impending disaster. This article suggests that an analysis of the prophetic voice in alphabet opens up a possibility to address the relationship between poetry and nuclear war and, in more general terms, between art and disaster.