Born in New York City, Lynne Hjelmgaard has lived in Rome, London, Paris, and The British Virgin Islands, which she still considers home. She presently lives in Copenhagen, Denmark and has sailed extensively in the States, the Caribbean, to Northern Europe and the Mediterranean.

Lynne has been writing since 1994 and attended the renowned workshops of Alice Notley and Douglas Oliver in Paris for a number of years where she was co-editor of the literary magazine Pharos. Her work is published in the United States, England, France and Austria. She has read at Poetry Festivals, bookshops, cafes and various other venues.

Lynne is the author of Distance Through the Water, I Want Press, Paris, (2002). Her first full length collection, Manhattan Sonnets was published by Redbeck Press (2003), United Kingdom.  An excerpt from her 22 page poem, The Coconut Rat Diary, appears in Bombay Gin, (2006), The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poets, The Naropa Institute and was recorded in CD Format, Brockhoff’ s Arkiv (2008) in Denmark.

She was in Residence in 2007 at the Danish Institute of Art and Technology in Rome and at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont.

Review comments, Manhattan Sonnets

“Her sensibility is one of honed transience, from the last fluttering of the American immigrant experience still hovering over its native born generations to the peripatetic circumstances that have kept her in motion in adulthood. As a poet, Hjelmgaard mines both the stored experience of changing scenes—of light and languages, of sea alternating with land—and the immediacy of the voyager who travels light, who receives only to release again, who sees and names, who breathes in and, having left attachment behind like some too- heavy belonging, breaths out.”

                       Linda Healey, Tears in the Fence, Issue 37, Spring 2004

“Lynne Hjelmgaard has an ear for memory, for dream, and for the co-existence of the imagined and the real. She writes in clear apprehension of past scenes-word precise, detail perfect, real furniture. Her Manhattan Sonnets, an homage to Edwin Denby’s Later Sonnets, are a marvelous evocation of his form and of Manhattan light in the 1960’s. Their narration of her early life in Stuyvesant Town, NYC, meshes with the European background of the other sequences to present a woman who has crossed the Atlantic and muddy fields: ‘The sky is always there….’  ”

                                                                                             Alice Notley

“[Manhattan Sonnets] are very physically active and not afraid of smells but full of New York spaces and some very particular persons. From beginning to end the language changes, grows older as situations get more complex and sometimes scary.”

                                                                                           Yvonne Jacquette

e-mail Lynne
web-site

poetry favourites:
 Jacket Magazine
Big Bridge
Lungfull
Brockhoff’ s Arkiv

and in the shop ...
collections -
"The Ring",
Shearsman;

"Manhattan Sonnets",
Redbeck Press;

"Distance Through the Water",
I Want Press

© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
site feedback welcome