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Warning Light Calling
Warning Light Calling is also about lost love, and it gives an accurate description of the anatomy of grief. Everything turns into madness, and the world is turned upside down because of the despair and the loneliness of the protagonist, Sputnik. We experience the Sputnik-psychosis of the Covid-19 and the precariat. Dissident Soviet literature, it feels, has been living a reclusive life away from the literary mainstream. Warning Light Calling borrows ideas from dissident Soviet literature in order understand contemporary themes and motifs as the precariat, Covid-19, East and West, capitalism, healthcare, mental issues, the individual in a globalized world and the worrying climate crisis.
It is a little treat of fine literature that attempt at leaving a bad taste in the mouth of the world reader - as it seduces her or him into following those forgotten feelings of political Soviet pathos.
It is a little treat of fine literature that attempt at leaving a bad taste in the mouth of the world reader - as it seduces her or him into following those forgotten feelings of political Soviet pathos.
72 pages, Paperback
Published September 22, 2021
7 people want to read
About the author
Peter Graarup Westergaard
4 books39 followersPeter Graarup Westergaard has published three poetry collections. Nordvest - Thydigte in 2017 (Legimus Forlag), also translated into English as Danish Northwest (2019). In 2021, he published his second poetry collection, Warning Light Calling (Vræyda Literary) in English. Then came, in 2025, his third collection of poetry: Djuɐslan – Nye digte (Attika). Beyond his poetry, he has also written Pandemier - Litteraturhistorier (Dansklærerforeningen) in 2022, a Danish textbook for high school students. He completed his 'magisterkonferens' in Comparative Literature at Aarhus University (2004) and holds a degree in English literature, also from Aarhus University (2015). He has also studied English literature at Concordia University, Montreal (2000-2001) and philosophy at Oxford University, Department of Continuing Education (2018-2020). He teaches Danish, English, and philosophy at a secondary boarding school in Denmark.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 9, 2021
Warning Light Calling is a collection of poems and short stories that depict a parallel world both very different and similar to our own. Despite the dystopic backdrop of sickness, pain, war, and endless bureaucracy, the tone and atmosphere in the poems and stories are ultimately optimistic and life-affirming. Dissidence and love are equated with one another in a way that makes me quite happy and hopeful for mankind.
My favorites, in no particular order, were:
Mayakovsky, I
Spacey Peter
It feels like
The Vygotsky Buns
Space Soldier
To My Tsarina
Dissidence
My favorites, in no particular order, were:
Mayakovsky, I
Spacey Peter
It feels like
The Vygotsky Buns
Space Soldier
To My Tsarina
Dissidence
April 17, 2022
Teeming with literary references ranging from the Ilyad, the Odyssey, counter-revolutionary Soviet poetry, Dostoevsky, William Burroughs and Thucydides, as well as from Vygotsky’s social interaction theory and Tarkovsky’s visionary filmography, Warning Light Calling by Peter Graarup Westergaard is a collection of poems exploring the concepts of infection and disintegration in a science-fictional version of contemporary Aarhus, Denmark.
Though it may globally feel like a narrative, Peter Graarup Westergaard’s book unmistakably deals with important universal issues from a poet’s distinctive and personal perspective, which in my view is what makes poetry true and necessary: shedding light into a question from an original, unexpected vantage point, sharing tiny gleaming revelations as they are uncovered from the debris of a specific (Western) literary tradition. More than anything, Warning Light Calling is about deconstruction and unlimitedness: on the one hand, the writing aims at deconstructing language and identity, disenfranchised by their own lack of purpose in a political and social landscape characterized by utter conformity, monoculture and blandness. On the other hand, the space adventure and the dissident status of visionary/troubadour/mentally ill/socially inapt Pete consciously decides to embrace allows the author to “sing the body electric” (as Whitman would say), and open both language and identity to all possible combinations. To use Graarup Westergaard’s own words, the writer can let us “experience again how the unlimited could be limited, the singular polyphonic the infinite final and the perfect imperfect” and reveal how identity ultimately is “unlimited, distributed”, celebrating the marvel of feeling that “There is no I in front of the wall to my mental prairie”.
Yet, in a world where democracy and war are the same thing, wishing for your own poetical unlimitedness to erupt without restraint can be very dangerous, because it is impossible to control: self-divided, shunned by the system and threatened by his own delusional thoughts, Pete constantly fights against the multiple versions of himself – the lover, the space cowboy, the dissident, the poet, the museum guide, the hot-dog seller, the gamer, the comrade, the lost citizen, the prisoner, the infected ̶ because he is threatened with social exclusion (possibly the most unspeakable of taboos in Nordic countries) and permanent human malfunctioning. More importantly, he is seen as a threat because the language he uses clashes with the language the system requires of him, which leads us back to William Burroughs’ famous statement: “Language is a virus from outer space” (from The ticket that exploded), a statement the book constantly goes back to and seems constantly haunted by.
In pandemic-stricken Aarhus, language makes control and totalitarianism not only possible, but inevitable and enduring. For a poet, the only solution can be cutting through its infallible linearity and cleanliness, turning language into a series of fragments which might elude the system and free individuals from authoritarianism. Epitome of high mutual trust level and excellent welfare system, Denmark is here depicted as a country losing (or on the cusp of losing) its authenticity, ravaged by a version of Corona virus which reads like a counterfeit of meaning, social responsibility, community and creativity and gives in to emotional interaction immunization, pre-arranged slogans fed to the populace to make them harmless via “chemotherapy against communication cancer”. In many ways, the entire book can be seen as a critique on Danish efficiency, but also as a “warning light calling” against the gradual deterioration of Nordic countries’ core values in the name of globalization and profit: as Pete and his (madness-generated?) lover Yelena try to “hide from the spreading death”, we can feel global capitalism, mutual distrust, populism and cultural repression lurking behind the ghost of death. And yet, the author seems to suggest, through poetry we can try to find meaning again, its beautiful madness lighting up in the sky hoping for someone to hear “the divine buzz from heaven” sent out from all poets floating into space, like “a trembling vibration in my weak flesh”.
Though it may globally feel like a narrative, Peter Graarup Westergaard’s book unmistakably deals with important universal issues from a poet’s distinctive and personal perspective, which in my view is what makes poetry true and necessary: shedding light into a question from an original, unexpected vantage point, sharing tiny gleaming revelations as they are uncovered from the debris of a specific (Western) literary tradition. More than anything, Warning Light Calling is about deconstruction and unlimitedness: on the one hand, the writing aims at deconstructing language and identity, disenfranchised by their own lack of purpose in a political and social landscape characterized by utter conformity, monoculture and blandness. On the other hand, the space adventure and the dissident status of visionary/troubadour/mentally ill/socially inapt Pete consciously decides to embrace allows the author to “sing the body electric” (as Whitman would say), and open both language and identity to all possible combinations. To use Graarup Westergaard’s own words, the writer can let us “experience again how the unlimited could be limited, the singular polyphonic the infinite final and the perfect imperfect” and reveal how identity ultimately is “unlimited, distributed”, celebrating the marvel of feeling that “There is no I in front of the wall to my mental prairie”.
Yet, in a world where democracy and war are the same thing, wishing for your own poetical unlimitedness to erupt without restraint can be very dangerous, because it is impossible to control: self-divided, shunned by the system and threatened by his own delusional thoughts, Pete constantly fights against the multiple versions of himself – the lover, the space cowboy, the dissident, the poet, the museum guide, the hot-dog seller, the gamer, the comrade, the lost citizen, the prisoner, the infected ̶ because he is threatened with social exclusion (possibly the most unspeakable of taboos in Nordic countries) and permanent human malfunctioning. More importantly, he is seen as a threat because the language he uses clashes with the language the system requires of him, which leads us back to William Burroughs’ famous statement: “Language is a virus from outer space” (from The ticket that exploded), a statement the book constantly goes back to and seems constantly haunted by.
In pandemic-stricken Aarhus, language makes control and totalitarianism not only possible, but inevitable and enduring. For a poet, the only solution can be cutting through its infallible linearity and cleanliness, turning language into a series of fragments which might elude the system and free individuals from authoritarianism. Epitome of high mutual trust level and excellent welfare system, Denmark is here depicted as a country losing (or on the cusp of losing) its authenticity, ravaged by a version of Corona virus which reads like a counterfeit of meaning, social responsibility, community and creativity and gives in to emotional interaction immunization, pre-arranged slogans fed to the populace to make them harmless via “chemotherapy against communication cancer”. In many ways, the entire book can be seen as a critique on Danish efficiency, but also as a “warning light calling” against the gradual deterioration of Nordic countries’ core values in the name of globalization and profit: as Pete and his (madness-generated?) lover Yelena try to “hide from the spreading death”, we can feel global capitalism, mutual distrust, populism and cultural repression lurking behind the ghost of death. And yet, the author seems to suggest, through poetry we can try to find meaning again, its beautiful madness lighting up in the sky hoping for someone to hear “the divine buzz from heaven” sent out from all poets floating into space, like “a trembling vibration in my weak flesh”.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews