Marianne Burton’s Kierkegaard’s Cupboard is a triumph. In sonnet variations, it charts the philosopher Kierkegaard’s thoughts, actions, life – not least his adoration of Regine whom he refused to marry, but never ceased loving. The “cupboard” is the cabinet where he stored his letters to, and his reminiscences of, his beloved Regine.

The collection is in six parts, from Childhood to Death. A helpful quality of this book is that one does not have to be familiar with Kierkegaard’s philosophy – the poems tell us what we need to know: Burton has done the research for us.

Part 1, “Childhood”, introduces us to the young Kierkegaard, his upbringing, and gives us clues as to why he later became known as “the father of existentialism for the emphasis he placed on the responsibility of the individual in determining his or her life’s meaning” (11). The first sonnet, “Echoes Fall in Strange Places’’ opens with:

Echoes fall in strange places.
My father as a shepherd boy, so cold
he warmed his hands on dung, turned his face
to the sky and cursed an indifferent God (13)

There are echoes (in a good way) of R. S. Thomas in these lines, but the last two lines can only represent Kierkegaard:

The sins of his melancholy love were blight
to our lives, but to my work they are foundation. (13)

It is, I think, beside the point to speculate upon the level of “happiness” Kierkegaard enjoyed throughout his life. What is happiness, anyway? But these lines from “I Have Just Returned from a Party” are telling:

I have just returned from a party.
I was the life and soul; banter flowed
from my lips; everyone laughed, admired,
thought me happy … (15)

But he continues, later:

The only dignified revenge on the world
is to smile, entertain, keep your pain hidden. (15)

Tony Hancock and a host of other comedians spring to mind here. I wonder if many of them read Kierkegaard – I know Frankie Howerd did.

In “My Umbrella, My Familiar”, we approach perhaps the adult Kierkegaard’s state of mind when he speaks about a particular umbrella but also tells us “I have other umbrellas’’ and:

Not being loved exclusively
does not reduce their sense of self. (17)

In Part II, “Regine’’, the preface tells us Kierkegaard became engaged to her when she was seventeen and deeply in love with him. But he ended the relationship, not because he didn’t love her, but because he felt his life’s work could only be achieved without her and he would inevitably make her deeply unhappy. He was devastated when she married someone else, but he remained convinced that marriage with him was out of the question.

This strange yet oddly understandable state of mind is brought into sharp focus in these lines from “When She Stood There Clad in Her Finery”:

when she stood there clad in her finery
i had to leave
when her delighted lively glance met mine
i had to leave
i went out and i wept bitterly (25)

The sonnet “In August I Approached Her’’ ends with:

Sadness is the best mistress, fidelis semper,
no wonder then that I return to her. (26)

But it is not only “sadness’’ as an abstract he returns to – he cannot fully release himself from Regine and, after she marries, and we skip (through lack of space) to Part IV, “After The Corsair”, in “Esteemed Sir, the Enclosed Letter Is from Me (S Kierkegaard)”, we find him asking her husband if he can meet her or at least correspond with her:

I would like to meet her with you there. Or if you think it better
we could correspond with you double-signing all her letters. (49)

This sounds almost reasonable! But the poem/letter ends with:

In this life she stands by your side, but in history she belongs to me.
You make her happy in this life – I will see to her immortality.

I probably don’t have to tell you that Regine’s husband refused!

Other sections of the collection illuminate wider aspects of Kierkegaard’s philosophy and life – a brief review does not allow the detailed comments the book deserves but, suffice to say, the poetry is not only lyrical, succinct, crafted and considered, it is also hugely entertaining.

A concept collection is a dangerous undertaking (can initial interest be grabbed quickly enough? Is there enough to say?) - and one on the mercurial Kierkegaard could easily explode like a faulty firework. But Burton’s picaresque jaunt through the melancholy life of her self-obsessed subject fizzes and pops continuously. The choice of a loosely turned sonnet form - shaped by internal rhymes and the occasional treat of a satisfying final couplet - works well. It conveys the sense of the spiral brooding thoughts of the misunderstood genius who, to misquote Oscar Wilde, may have known the value of true love but feared its cost. Like Kierkegaard’s own oeuvre, this collection is a delicious hybrid of genres - part biography, part flight of fantasy. Burton’s imagination captures the philosopher’s voice, but surely injects an irony and depth of self-awareness which goes beyond his own solipsistic obsessions. I loved the idea of the umbrella which retained its full ‘sense of self’ despite ‘[n]ot being loved exclusively.’ Would we could all be so blessed.

The collection is separated into sections each chronicling a different stage of Kierkegaard’s life (the titles of the poems are, for the most part, first lines.) Burton manages to act as biographer and confessor, mapping the peaks and troughs of emotion as he rejects his lover. His sense of dislocation is cunningly portrayed in the one-off devices in ‘Either/Or’, which uses oblique slashes as well as rare choice of vernacular language, and the sole instance of lower case for the first person pronoun in ‘When she Stood there Clad in her Finery.’ Were there conscious echoes of Peter’s confession of his betrayal of Christ in the lines: ‘i had to leave/i went out and i wept bitterly’? I suspect yes, as Burton demonstrates her knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures, too, in her poems about Kierkegaard’s riff on the Akeda, the binding of Isaac. In these poems, small repetitions reinforce the menacing quality of the subject:

silently he lit the wood
silently he bound his child
silently he drew the knife

Burton creates a mediation on life, pain, death; the futility of love and its addictive thrall. Here is a learned, but playful, mind, whose collection far from being ‘witness that you are a second-rate writer’ delivers its promise, in bushels.

‘Readers coming to the poem for the first time’, writes Seamus Heaney in his introduction to his translation of Beowulf, ‘are likely to experience something other than mere discomfiture when faced with the strangeness of the names... and lack of known reference points’.

A comparable discomfiture to being ‘faced with the strangeness of names’ must be that of having to engage, unversed, with the life and works of an enigmatic theorist. Marianne Burton’s Kierkegaard’s Cupboard, a collection of fifty sonnets, puts paid to any such qualms. ‘This is not a work of scholarship or translation,’ Burton assures us in The Author’s Note, ‘this is a personal interpretation’. Divided into six chapters, each with explanatory notes, Burton holds our hand throughout. And the cover image, Interior with Woman Reading, by Carl Holsøe – a corner cupboard at its centre - Whistler-esque in its grey hues, initiates a perfect mis-en-scène.
        A love story, Kierkegaard’s Cupboard traces the impact of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s life-long passion for Regine Olsen to whom he was briefly engaged. The palisander, or rosewood, cupboard is both real and symbolic - a container that Kierkegaard commissioned to house ‘all the documents that made us’.
        Told through Kierkegaard’s writings, with Burton confessing that ‘some of the poems are more Kierkegaard’s than mine’ – parts of Fear and Trembling, such as in When the Child Is To Be Weaned ‘the mother blackens her breast’ are transcribed almost verbatim as verse – the poems, predominantly written in the first person, are immediate, pithy and very, very readable. Echoes Fall In Strange Places, the first poem in Childhood, introduces Kierkegaard’s father, crying ‘out in his sleep at night’, his ‘sins of melancholy love’ becoming Kierkegaard’s work’s ‘foundation’. As with Captain Alving in Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, whose adulterously-contracted syphilis is ‘inherited’ by his son, so Kierkegaard’s father’s depression infects Søren. ‘I carry grief/ embedded in my heart’ admits Burton’s Kierkegaard in I Have Just Returned From A Party, literally cutting through its form with a sentence in parentheses commanding: ‘(make that dash as long as the radii of the earth’s orbit)’ followed by a drawn line and ‘I want to shoot myself ’.
        Burton’s Kierkegaard’s darkness pervades the book, ‘the least serious’ child of For A Long Time He Was Very Childish, a pseudo school report, becoming the man of I Must Decide What To Do – its first line is a stunningly terse ‘Not’ – who seeks ‘One truth for which I live and die’. Either/Or, evidently a pastiche of his book of the same title, has Kierkegaard remonstrating with himself: ‘marry the girl or don’t’. By In August I Approached Her Kierkegaard has cast Regine off – ‘three people wrote my life: one, a melancholy man, two, a child- woman, three, my close companion, grief ’.
        The poems tantalize with their un- answered questions. Deftly, often playfully, Burton intertwines Kierkegaard’s unsated love with his Existentialist ideas, his wrangles with the established Church, his lampooning by The Corsair and his early death aged forty-two. Kierkegaard’s Cupboard is, though on Burton’s own admission ‘not at all proper’, quite simply a joy.

Despite her extensive research, Burton modestly claims that her book is not a work of scholarship or translation. Instead, she refers to it as “a personal interpretation in the same way that jazz interpretations pay homage to standards”. In the author’s note she writes: “I hope readers will go on to read proper books about him. This is a book of poetry and as such is not at all proper.”

The poems are presented in six parts which follow in chronological order and correspond to the different phases of Kierkegaard’s life: Childhood; Regine; The Writings; After The Corsair; The Moment, and Death. The chronology is a perfect match to the opening quotation: It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life can only be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards. (Søren Aabye Kierkegaard – Journal 1843).

Every poem in the book, including the opening poem ‘How To Write A Preface’ is written as a sonnet. Far from setting herself any formal constraints,  Burton ingeniously succeeds in presenting us with a huge variety of layouts in terms of stanza breaks and line length (in one case there is just one word in the opening line) while at the same time ensuring that every poem takes up the requisite 14 lines. With few exceptions, the title of each poem is taken from the first line and each of the six sections is preceded by a short commentary or word of explanation referring to each particular phase in Kierkegaard’s life so that the reader does not have to refer to footnotes.

Although he is known chiefly as a philosopher and theologian, Kierkegaard was also a poet. Commenting on this, Burton states that “some poems are more Kierkegaard’s than mine and vice versa”.  While several of the poems in this collection read more like prose, the nature of the precise phrasing more than makes up for the absence of metaphor. Even in the more lyrical pieces, where the vocabulary is not particularly adventurous, Burton still holds our attention:

    Something wonderful happened yesterday.

     I left for heaven. The old gods summoned me.

     Mercury said, ‘Various gifts we have to give away:

     power, long life, the loveliest women, beauty.

     Choose – but only one.’

The emphasis here, as in most of the poems in this collection, is on the storyline. Burton has the knack of distilling a whole story into 14 lines. She uses poetic description sparingly and yet there is still something hypnotic about her technique that draws us in. Take, for example, the opening stanza of this poem which is described as being a letter Kierkegaard wrote to his brother’s wife who suffered poor health:

     Above all, Jette, do not forget to walk.

     I have walked myself into all my best thoughts

     and I know no thought so burdensome

     that I cannot walk away from it.

     Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being

     and away from illness.

     I promise, it is possible.

The repetition of “walk” and “thought” is immediately striking. Walking is a way of thinking yourself into a positive state of mind. In another poem, ‘Not A Day Without A Line’ Burton writes:

     not a day without walking

     for to forget to walk is to forget one has a body

Her best poems are the quiet, reflective ones that have beautiful accomplished endings. In the final section of the book she writes:

     How quiet dying is. Like the greatest hazard

     of all, losing the self, which often happens quietly

     in the world, as if it were nothing…

Burton has researched her subject matter well and has skilfully managed to convert biography into poetry. In so doing, she has given us a glimpse into the life of Kierkegaard, including his yearning for Regine, his rant against journalists, his approach to Christianity and the church, which is both tantalising and revealing and makes us hungry for more.