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The Case of the Danish King Halfdene is a journey to a magical nowhere, where the road signs, the danger, and the will to continue are all in the mind. The assertion that: "Navigational skills are not required. Where you are going is the least of your concerns..." sums up the theme of this amazing collection of prose poems. Like a dedication, Freeland writes at the end of the titular piece: "For those afraid they may have stumbled, by accident, into the wrong existence. And will have to stay here..."

The tone of The Case of the Danish King Halfdene, like most of Freeland's work, contains an underlying assumption that the reader is familiar with the complex backdrop of... More > the mythical elements he drops along the way.

In "Very Bad Poetry," one gets a glimpse of Freeland's writing ethos or lack thereof: "If we aren’t sure, though, why something behaves the way it does—why the garbage smells like pine trees in the morning, and vice versa, why the giraffe has to bend that way to drink—it’s proper policy to pretend like we understand anyway."

In "Not Yet the Sounds of Speech," dark humor shines through: "Sometimes it’s better to meditate in the afternoon than whisper to some deity you can’t even be sure wears any clothes..."

The marvelous "A Disturbance in the Magnetic Field," which is the strongest piece in this collection, "infers" something which the author presupposes would have been obvious to everybody: "Every claustrophobic knows, for instance, that walls are, in fact, a wonderful invention. The kind of thing that keeps people from inferring your motives."

References to ekphrastic motives in "Twilight of the Big Finish." The piece entitled "Getting Through the Last Pages" is a treatise on hopelessness. "Spring Cleaning in the Labyrinth of the Continuum" is set in a Borges-like wasteland. The last piece, "Why Light Was Invented," questions our interpretations of reality. < Less