New Collected Poems

Product Description

Tomas Transtromer won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is Swedens most important poet. This book

Includes:: all the poems he has written during the past fifty years including those from the Bloodaxe Collected Poems of 1987 as well as three later collections For Living & Dead (1989) The Sad Gondola (1996) & The Great Enigma (2004) & a prose memoir. 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 & waking between the conscious & unconscious states. Transtromer was born in 1931 in Stockholm where he grew up but spent many long summers on the island of Runmaro 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 & relaxed often reflecting his broad interests: travel music painting archaeology & natural sciences. Many of his poems use compressed description & concentrate on a single distinct image as a catalyst for psychological insight & metaphysical interpretation. This acts as a meeting-point or threshold between conflicting elements or forces: sea & land man & nature freedom & control. Robin Fulton has worked with Tomas Transtromer on each of his collections as they have been published over many years which has involved detailed exchanges between translator & poet on the meaning & music of numerous poems. There have been several translations as well as some books of so-called versions" of Transtromers poetry published in English but Fultons is the most authoritative & comprehensive edition of his poetry published anywhere."