Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. Tomas Transtromer is Sweden's 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 two later collections, FOR LIVING AND DEAD and THE SAD GONDOLA, and his prose memoir MEMORIES LOOK AT ME. The 2010 reprint has been
expanded to include his most recent collection, THE GREAT ENIGMA (2004), making this the definitive English edition of Transtromer's work, a complete translation of all his Swedish collections.
In his early work Transtromer drew on the aesthetic traditions of Swedish nature poetry. His poetry then became more personal, open and relaxed. 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. 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 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 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 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.
