Böcker av Tomas Transtromer

"A collection of poetry and prose by Tomas Transtrèomer, translated by Patty Crane"--

A short selection of haunting, meditative poems from the winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in LiteratureTomas Tranströmer can be clearly recognized not just as Sweden's most important poet, but as a writer of international stature whose work speaks to us now with undiminished clarity and resonance. Long celebrated as a master of the arresting, suggestive image, Tranströmer is a poet of the liminal: drawn again and again to thresholds of light and of water, the boundaries between man and nature, wakefulness and dream. A deeply spiritual but secular writer, his skepticism about humanity is continually challenged by the implacable renewing power of the natural world. His poems are epiphanies rooted in experience: spare, luminous meditations that his extraordinary images split open-exposing something sudden, mysterious, and unforgettable.

Tomas Tranströmer's poems are thick with the feel of life lived in a specific place: the dark, overpowering Swedish winters, the long thaws and brief paradisal summers in the Stockholm archipelago. He conveys a sense of what it is like to be a private citizen in the second half of the twentieth century.

Tomas Transtr¿mer was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1931, and spent his career as a psychologist. His poetry has been translated into more than fifty languages. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011, and numerous other honours from around the world during his lifetime. He died on March 26, 2015.

The illuminating letters of Nobel Prize winning poet Tomas Transtromer and celebrated American writer and poet Robert Bly offer insights into their life and times, and the processes of translation.

In day's first hours consciousness can grasp the worldas the hand grips a sun-warmed stone.Translated into fifty languages, the poetry of Tomas Transtromer has had a profound influence around the world, an influence that has steadily grown and has now attained a prominence comparable to that of Pablo Neruda's during his lifetime. But if Neruda is blazing fire, Transtromer is expanding ice. The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems gathers all the poems Tomas Transtromer has published, from his distinctive first collection in 1954, 17 Poems, through his epic poem Baltics ("my most consistent attempt to write music"), and The Sad Gondola, published six years after he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1990 ("I am carried in my shadow / like a violin / in its black case."), to his most recent slim book, The Great Enigma, published in Sweden in 2004. Also included is his prose-memoir Memories Look at Me, containing keys into his intensely spiritual, metaphysical poetry (like the brief passage of insect collecting on Runmaro Island when he was a teenager). Firmly rooted in the natural world, his work falls between dream and dream; it probes "the great unsolved love" with the opening up, through subtle modulations, of "concrete words."

Tomas Transtroemer (1931-2015) was Sweden's most important poet of the past fifty years. This book contains all the poems he published. Robin Fulton's translation is the most authoritative and comprehensive edition of his poetry published anywhere.