Tomas Transtromer

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.

Selected Poems

Tomas Tranströmer

A collection of over 175 poems by Swedish author Tomas Tranströmer.

The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems

Patty Crane

Collected Works of Tomas Tranströmer

Blue House

With this new volume of poetry, Tomas Transtromer once again demonstrates his gift for capturing and grounding the elusive, luminous details of our modern world. As its title suggests, For the Living and the Dead works to bridge the space between those real and unreal elements of life, suggesting that a surprising, redemptive cohesion can exist within a universe of opposing forces. Transtromer has referred to his poems as "meeting places," with "their intent to make a sudden connection between aspects of reality that conventional languages and outlooks ordinarily keep apart. Large and small details of the landscape meet, divided cultures and people flow together in a work of art. . ." People and objects alike are given a certain weightiness, their presence filled with a potential carefully measured by the poet's eye and quietly attested to by his language. In "Vermeer," "The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall. /It is like a prayer to what is empty./ And what is empty turns its face to us/ and whispers/ 'I am not empty, I am open.'" This volume combines Transtromer's recent poetry with a prose memoir of his childhood in Sweden, written in the same careful, unsentimental voice for which he is so beloved. Through this memoir the author reveals himself as a curious, sensitive child, interested in archeology and insects, terrified of school and his authoritarian teachers. Characterized by the insight and integrity we have come to expect from his work, For the Living and the Dead confirms Tomas Transtromer as one of the most significant living poets writing in any language.

For the Living and the Dead

Windows & Stones

Robert Bly

Half-Finished Heaven

This is a collection of all the poems Transtromer has written over the past 40 years. His poems are often explorations of the borderland between sleep and waking, between the conscious and the dreaming states."

New Collected Poems

The poems of Tomas Transtömer are points of entry upward into/ the depths of an imagination, a spirit that is regeneratively inventive, capacious, unillusioned, undaunted, admirable. --The New York Times Book Review.

The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer

The Half-Finished Heaven

The illuminating letters of the National Book Award winning poet Robert Bly and the Nobel Prize winning poet Tomas Tranströmer One day in spring 1964, the young American poet Robert Bly left his rural farmhouse and drove 150 miles to the University of Minnesota library in Minneapolis to obtain the latest book by the young Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. When Bly returned home that evening with a copy of Tranströmer's The Half-Finished Heaven, he found a letter waiting for him from its author. With this remarkable coincidence as its beginning, what followed was a vibrant correspondence between two poets who would become essential contributors to global literature. Airmail collects more than 290 letters, written from 1964 until 1990, when Tranströmer suffered a stroke that has left him partially paralyzed and diminished his capacity to write. Across their correspondence, the two poets are profoundly engaged with each other and with the larger world: the Vietnam War, European and American elections, and the struggles of affording a life as a writer. Airmail also illuminates the work of translation as Bly began to render Tranströmer's poetry into English and Tranströmer began to translate Bly's poetry into Swedish. Their collaboration quickly turned into a friendship that has lasted fifty years. Insightful, brilliant, and often funny, Airmail provides a rare portrait of two artists who have become integral to each other's particular genius. This publication marks the first time letters by Bly and Tranströmer have been made available in the United States.

The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Transtromer

Airmail

The Swedish poet's works reflect the technological nature of his homeland, including poems in Swedish and English which tell of man's alienation, bleak landscapes, and confrontations which yield connections

Poems

Truth Barriers

Tomas Tranströmer’s touching memoir. Written a few years after Transtromer suffered a stroke that left him unable to speak, Memories Look at Me is Tomas Tranströmer’s lyrical autobiography about growing up in Sweden. His story opens with a streak of light, a comet that becomes a brilliant metaphor for “my life” as he tries to penetrate the earliest, formative memories of his past. This childhood life unfolds itself slowly in eight glistening chapters that gradually reveal the most secret of treasures: how Tranströmer discovered poetry.

Memories Look at Me: A Memoir

A short selection of haunting, meditative poems from the winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature Tomas 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 Transtromer

Books

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