Nanna Jeiner worked in various jobs after leaving school and later became a freelance publishing assistant. Her debut work was the poetry collection Afrodite tager hjem, 1978, consisting of beautiful and mellow love poems that philosophise and are set in a mythical and bodily universe where the demanding, capricious, and beautiful Aphrodite is a goddess of love and a mirror of the female sex, but not the only one. Countless mysterious names emerge in the imaginary world of the female first person, and the poems explore and penetrate the unkown, the tempting, and the sensitizing elements of the erotic.
In her subsequent poetry collection Mellem fire vægge, 1979, she presents more searching and sexually aroused poetry, but at the same time adds a new religious dimension. The collection is shaped like a suite which plays out the different times of the day and centres on forms of experience where everything is present, yet disappearing. Nanna Jeiner has written only a few works, but what she has written is of a high quality, and, with hindsight, it is fair to say that her writing set the tone for modern women’s poetry in the 1980s.