Matthew Landrum’s translation of Faroese poet and filmmaker Katrin Ottarsdóttir’s Are There Copper Pipes In Heaven has the insularity of all great horror stories. The Faroe Islands, an antonymous territory of Denmark, is, after all, an archipelago, population of 52,000. Are There Copper Pipes In Heaven—only the second book of Faroese poetry to be translated into English—is a family drama about a mother’s mental illness. Her mood swings smash any semblance of normalcy. One day she rewards her husband for his rhubarb stew, the next she punishes him for it, attacks him with a knife, tortures him in his basement sanctuary with the noise of her turning off and on the faucets, flushing toilets. 

Landrum introduces the collection with the popular opinion, or opposition, he encountered while doing the translation: “I do not know that she should have written it.” I remember reading that Kafka, with reference to The Metamorphosis, said, and I paraphrase, “One should never write about the bedbugs in one’s own family.” Kafka, I remember, also wanted to burn his manuscripts on his deathbed. Breaking taboo is never easy. “There’s no one to talk with about everything that can’t be said,” declares Child, “everything that doesn’t want to be said.”

If Are There Copper Pipes In Heaven is confessional poetry, its confessions are purposeful: ways of talking about things that are difficult to talk about. How seriously we should take threats of self-harm when we hear them, for example. “The Suicide” is the title of three poems that structure the book. In each, the ghostly personification of suicide assumes a different aspect: in the first, it “smells / as only a mother can smell.” During sex, it squeezes K-Y Jelly “into needy palms,” highlighting the union of sex and death in marriage itself. In the second, the suicide is Child’s playmate: hopscotch, hide and seek, red rover. The suicide revels:

the suicide once again sneaks out of its narrow corners      

goes howling through the house

full of joy invites everyone to dance

a mad dance of burning bridges

By the time we reach the third poem, however, the coming-of-age story of the girl Child has reached the stage of her metabolizing the horror of her mother’s condition and abuse of her father into something “like breathless joy / that can only bleed internally / until the heart bursts with happy fatigue.” It’s around here that Child carries the narrative away from the house of horrors into the world at large and translates, like Landrum, her childhood trauma into a source of incredible power.  

June 2020