Marks of the Moon

The book seeks to combine knowledgeable and loving insight with a clarifying and cohesive overview.
The insight comes with the many very different personal statements about a close, practical and artistic collaboration with the author: articles by Klaus Rifbjerg, Palle Kjærulff-Schmidt, Povl Dissing. Jarl Borgen, Cynthia Andersen with the middle and nickname Rosalina. And statements by Benny Andersen himself in a workshop interview.
The overview is provided by extensive demarcations along and across the authorship. It is followed in its extensive chronological course through approx. 50 years in the most important genres: poetry, prose, songs and children's books. Here, both the continuity and the innovations in Benny Andersen's production are highlighted. Through transverse probing, the humor is illuminated as the watermark in his poetry. In addition to his attitude to life, his themes and motifs, his poetics, his surprising, unorthodoxly experimental and boundary-crossing imagination and language universe are illuminated.
Finally, the reception of his poetry is examined, as the press's reaction to the poetry collections from the early 1960s is compared with the reaction the author received to his poems in the 1990s. In continuation of this, the focus is on the conspicuous popularity of the author and the costs it may have.