New Collected PoemsTomas Tranströmer (1931-2015) was Sweden's most important poet of the past fifty years. This book contains all the poems he published, including those from the Bloodaxe Collected Poems of 1987, as well as three later collections, For Living and Dead (1989), The Sad Gondola (1996) and The Great Enigma (2004), and a prose memoir. A further revised edition was published in 2011. In Sweden he has been called a 'buzzard poet' because his haunting, visionary poetry shows the world from a height, in a mystic dimension, but brings every detail of the natural world into sharp focus. His poems are often explorations of the borderland between sleep and waking, between the conscious and unconscious states. Tranströomer was born in Stockholm, where he grew up, but spent many long summers on the island of Runmarö in the nearby archipelago, evoking that landscape in his early work, which draws on the aesthetic tradition of Swedish nature poetry. His later poetry is more personal, open and relaxed, often reflecting his broad interests: travel, music, painting, archaeology and natural sciences. Many of his poems use compressed description and concentrate on a single distinct image as a catalyst for psychological insight and metaphysical interpretation. This acts as a meeting-point or threshold between conflicting elements or forces: sea and land, man and nature, freedom and control. Robin Fulton worked with Tomas Tranströmer on each of his collections as they were published over many years, which involved detailed exchanges between translator and poet on the meaning and music of numerous poems. There have been several translations as well as some books of so-called "versions" of Transtromer's poetry published in English, but Fulton's is the most authoritative and comprehensive edition of his poetry published anywhere. |
Contents
POEMS 1954 | 10 |
Gogol 1997 | 23 |
Solitary Swedish Houses | 39 |
Copyright | |
17 other sections not shown
Common terms and phrases
Africa autumn Axis Powers Baltics birds blue boat Bocken butterfly close clouds colour comes crowd dark dead death door dream droshky earth empty Enskede Eslöv everything eyes face feel film floor forest Gamla Stan glass glides glittering gondola grass grey Hötorget insects inside island Jeremiah Clarke Kungsholmen light lived look Målle memory morning Mother move murmuring Natural History Museum Nazism never night Norrbro Östermalm past poem poetry pupils rain remember René Char Riddarholmen rises rolled round Runmarö sails sapphic stanzas shadow shines silent Skåne Skrubba sleep smell Söder Södra Latin someone space stand stanza step Stockholm Central Station stones stood stopped street suddenly summer teacher thought Tomas Tranströmer Tranströmer trees turned Väinämöinen voices walk walls wind window wings winter wood words write