This book deals mainly with contemporary Danish poems. It is an attempt to understand both a number of general features and special characteristics linked to the poems. A significant feature is the linguistic strangeness found in these poems, as they differ from other poems that have clear narrative progressions or that are built with the exchange of lines as we know it from dramas (plays). This strangeness shows itself in the enigmas of the language as well as the special rhetoric and formal structure (stanzas, verses, line breaks, special spaces between words, etc.) that are often associated with it. To distinguish them from narrative and dramatic poems, they are called lyric poems.
The linguistic strangeness also makes them differ from the prevailing discourses that we encounter in our everyday life at the doctor, at the job center, at educational institutions, in the speech of politicians, etc. This difference can be understood as an upheaval of such discourses. The lyrical form of the poems constitutes a break with the discourses that dominate our time. However, the linguistic strangeness not only constitutes a break with this, but also confronts the reader with a language that he does not normally use. Lyrical poems therefore constitute a special linguistic event.
