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Selected Poems
Winner of many prestigious awards, including the Bonner Award for Poetry, Germany's Petrarch Prize, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, Tomas Transtromer captures the mood of an era which is at once lonely and threatening. Few poets are capable of relating basic truths about the human condition in troubled times with such quiet grace and figurative skill. This volume vitally represents the immense talent and insight of one of the world's finest poets.p
190 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1981
23 people are currently reading
615 people want to read
About the author
Tomas Tranströmer
155 books387 followersHis poetry, building on Modernism, Expressionism, and Surrealism, contains powerful imagery concerned with issues of fragmentation and isolation. “He has perfected a particular kind of epiphanic lyric, often in quatrains, in which nature is the active, energizing subject, and the self (if the self is present at all) is the object,” notes critic Katie Peterson in the Boston Review.
Critic and poet Tom Sleigh observed, in his Interview with a Ghost (2006), that “Tranströmer’s poems imagine the spaces that the deep then inhabits, like ground water gushing up into a newly dug well.”
His honors include the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, the Aftonbladets Literary Prize, the Bonnier Award for Poetry, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Oevralids Prize, the Petrarch Prize in Germany, the Swedish Award from International Poetry Forum,the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize, and especially the 2011 Nobel Prize in literature. His work has been translated into more than 50 languages.
Tranströmer suffered a stroke in 1990, and after a six-year silence published his collection Sorgegondolen (Grief Gondola) (1996). Prior to his stroke, he worked as a psychologist, focusing on the juvenile prison population as well as the disabled, convicts, and drug addicts. He lives in Sweden.
On Thursday, 6th of October 2011 he was awarded the Nobel prize in Literature "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality".
Critic and poet Tom Sleigh observed, in his Interview with a Ghost (2006), that “Tranströmer’s poems imagine the spaces that the deep then inhabits, like ground water gushing up into a newly dug well.”
His honors include the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, the Aftonbladets Literary Prize, the Bonnier Award for Poetry, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Oevralids Prize, the Petrarch Prize in Germany, the Swedish Award from International Poetry Forum,the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize, and especially the 2011 Nobel Prize in literature. His work has been translated into more than 50 languages.
Tranströmer suffered a stroke in 1990, and after a six-year silence published his collection Sorgegondolen (Grief Gondola) (1996). Prior to his stroke, he worked as a psychologist, focusing on the juvenile prison population as well as the disabled, convicts, and drug addicts. He lives in Sweden.
On Thursday, 6th of October 2011 he was awarded the Nobel prize in Literature "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality".
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 54 reviews
March 22, 2019
I was disappointed in the
banality of thoughts made
- not less - meaningless by
putting them into a pseudo-poetical form that sometimes breaks with a pattern just to
make a point(less) statement on
life at its most boring in the most simplistic
circumstances - och allt det på svenska, ett språk jag förstår, om än ej diktaren.
Luckily, I completed the collected works in one sitting - and it is not
much
longer than a short shopping list, and not much deeper either, but maybe telling in the same way of a life lived in the literal sense
of the word and
the action
Tranströmer, you are not for me.
But then I changed my mind, or maybe my mind changed me, and his words made sense.
banality of thoughts made
- not less - meaningless by
putting them into a pseudo-poetical form that sometimes breaks with a pattern just to
make a point(less) statement on
life at its most boring in the most simplistic
circumstances - och allt det på svenska, ett språk jag förstår, om än ej diktaren.
Luckily, I completed the collected works in one sitting - and it is not
much
longer than a short shopping list, and not much deeper either, but maybe telling in the same way of a life lived in the literal sense
of the word and
the action
Tranströmer, you are not for me.
But then I changed my mind, or maybe my mind changed me, and his words made sense.
June 28, 2024
I don’t think Tranströmer would feel very comfortable with the adjective spiritual used to describe his poetry, but I can’t help myself. So apologies in advance wherever you are Mr. Tranströmer, but that is how this humble reader felt when she immersed in your poetic world.
There is an undeniable realistic approach to Tranströmer’s poetry, a frank, unafraid stare at the mysteries of life and death. Portraits of everyday life and fondness for nature are recurrent images in his poems, revealing a mystical insight into the universal aspects of the human mind. Interior and exterior converge in Tranströmer’s vision:
“Two truths approach each other. One comes from within,
one comes from without – and where they meet you have the chance to catch a look at yourself.”
Preludes (1966)
His poetry also stands out for its powerful presence and for the undulatory rhythm of psychology and dreams mumbling incessantly at the backdrop of Tranströmer’s polyphonic stanzas. Hence the surrealist touch in his style but at the same time his verses appear deeply rooted to the processes of the natural world. There is an intrinsic respect for the language of the natural elements and it is often that his poetry alludes directly to the lack of meaning of the written word in comparison to the ancient wisdom of nature.
“Tired of all who come with words, words but no language
I went to the snow-covered island.
The wild does not have words.
The unwritten pages spread themselves out in all directions!
I come across the marks of roe-deer’s hooves in the snow.
Language but no words.”
From March’79
Spiritual or modernist, surreal or cogent, Tranströmer’s oeuvre invites to slow pondering on the uncomfortable questions of existence, his is a creative, unflinching invitation to connect with the outer world through your inner perception of it.
There is an undeniable realistic approach to Tranströmer’s poetry, a frank, unafraid stare at the mysteries of life and death. Portraits of everyday life and fondness for nature are recurrent images in his poems, revealing a mystical insight into the universal aspects of the human mind. Interior and exterior converge in Tranströmer’s vision:
“Two truths approach each other. One comes from within,
one comes from without – and where they meet you have the chance to catch a look at yourself.”
Preludes (1966)
His poetry also stands out for its powerful presence and for the undulatory rhythm of psychology and dreams mumbling incessantly at the backdrop of Tranströmer’s polyphonic stanzas. Hence the surrealist touch in his style but at the same time his verses appear deeply rooted to the processes of the natural world. There is an intrinsic respect for the language of the natural elements and it is often that his poetry alludes directly to the lack of meaning of the written word in comparison to the ancient wisdom of nature.
“Tired of all who come with words, words but no language
I went to the snow-covered island.
The wild does not have words.
The unwritten pages spread themselves out in all directions!
I come across the marks of roe-deer’s hooves in the snow.
Language but no words.”
From March’79
Spiritual or modernist, surreal or cogent, Tranströmer’s oeuvre invites to slow pondering on the uncomfortable questions of existence, his is a creative, unflinching invitation to connect with the outer world through your inner perception of it.
July 25, 2020
These lines are often understated, seldom pulsating or brittle.
The images are often rural, silent and vast.
There’s a growing sense of history as the decades pass, a Danton who arrives unexpectedly during an autumn rain. The Baltic Sea waxes and flows, a gramophone warbles from the attic.
The images are often rural, silent and vast.
There’s a growing sense of history as the decades pass, a Danton who arrives unexpectedly during an autumn rain. The Baltic Sea waxes and flows, a gramophone warbles from the attic.
December 19, 2014
Another autumn has come and gone and this one I'll remember for the fogs that hung over the town while the leaves changed; a report about a wolf or a coyote that might have been waiting at the end of the path; a beautiful, rolling piece of farmland I had hoped for years the developers wouldn't destroy for profit, an example of our agricultural town since gone, ground evoking the historical past where the empire had once marched through these fields (the British Empire, in this case) to sway us into submission. "Please, please, please, no more mansions; keep this one piece of ground as is," I would say to myself, a shout out to the latest empire (the American one, in this case). All those years thinking the same thing, but little had I known this piece of farmland had been bought by the town as conservation land. A little sign under some trees explains it. Geez, all those internal debates spread out over the years: how had I missed the sign?
Tranströmer will locate a sacred vessel on his wanderings and will push the empire of human society up against the empire of earth's seasons to write a poem. Words are a form of technology and they get in the way of seeing; he would rather the unspoken language,
FROM MARCH '79
Tired of all who come with words, words but no language
I went to the snow-covered island.
The wild does not have words.
The unwritten pages spread themselves out in all directions!
I come across the marks of roe-deer's hooves in the snow.
Language but no words.
The vast, hopeful azure the great 19th century French poets meditated upon while they looked up to the sky, a crystal blue purity where the air is thinnest, is now filled with airplanes, satellites to transmit our favorite programs but also to spy on us, smog, pollution, a place where the drones hover, the occasional bird. Impressive feats of ingenuity all that (except for the bird, the ingenuity of which is beyond our knowing). Tranströmer wishes to be more alert to the greater god,
SUMMER MEADOW
There's so much we must be witness to.
Reality wears us so thin
but here is summer at last:
a large airport - the controller brings
down planeload after planeload of frozen
people from outer space.
The grass and the flowers - here's where we land.
The grass has a green supervisor
I report to him.
That the two empires are at such variance to each other, Tranströmer, seemingly numbed, writes poems that at times feels scared before the shock of the sublime. Shakespeare's gardens hang heavy with fruit to snatch and enjoy; Basho finds comedy in watching the long rainfall rise up the long legs of a heron at the edge of a pond ("have we really been staring at each other this long?" he asks), which showed for both of them they were at peace with the world's bounty. Tranströmer, like Wallace Stevens before him, or those writing today like Marzanna Kielar from Poland (who had stated pre-Nobel she admires Tranströmer), Mari Kashiwagi from Japan, or Philippe Jaccottet from France, don't convey that much movement in their landscapes; they sense they do harm to the sacred vessel; they write like they fear their powers as poets.
THE HALF-FINISHED HEAVEN
Despondency breaks off its course.
Anguish breaks off its course.
The vulture breaks off its flight.
The eager light streams out,
even the ghosts take a drink.
And our paintings see daylight,
our red beasts of the ice-age studios.
Everything begins to look around.
We walk in the sun in hundreds.
Each man is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.
The endless ground under us.
The water is shining among the trees.
The lake is a window into the earth.
The poems are expansive, capacious, they see much. I only wish they weren't so shocked into being. Take it from Shakespeare, the world is large and terrifying and too complex to comprehend. That's what makes it so beautiful. You are not a god, and that's obvious. Groups of people pass before Tranströmer's or Stevens's eyes and all they can see are the undifferentiated, a mob, a mass of people heading for the grave. Sometimes I feel like yelling at them: then individualize them! Or to quote Tranströmer himself in the final line of this poem, Proceed! Go for it! Make them real (for crissakes)!
THE STATION
A train has rolled in. Carriage after carriage stands,
but no doors open, no one gets off or on.
Are there no doors to be found at all? In there it is crowded
with locked-in people who are moving to and fro.
They are staring out through the immovable windows.
And outside a man goes along the train with a hammer.
He strikes on the wheels, which toll faintly. Except right here!
Here the ringing swells incomprehensibly: a thunderclap,
a cathedral-bells-sound, a world-circumnavigating-sound,
that lifts the whole train and the neighborhood's wet stones.
Everything is singing. You will remember this. Proceed!
Tranströmer will locate a sacred vessel on his wanderings and will push the empire of human society up against the empire of earth's seasons to write a poem. Words are a form of technology and they get in the way of seeing; he would rather the unspoken language,
FROM MARCH '79
Tired of all who come with words, words but no language
I went to the snow-covered island.
The wild does not have words.
The unwritten pages spread themselves out in all directions!
I come across the marks of roe-deer's hooves in the snow.
Language but no words.
The vast, hopeful azure the great 19th century French poets meditated upon while they looked up to the sky, a crystal blue purity where the air is thinnest, is now filled with airplanes, satellites to transmit our favorite programs but also to spy on us, smog, pollution, a place where the drones hover, the occasional bird. Impressive feats of ingenuity all that (except for the bird, the ingenuity of which is beyond our knowing). Tranströmer wishes to be more alert to the greater god,
SUMMER MEADOW
There's so much we must be witness to.
Reality wears us so thin
but here is summer at last:
a large airport - the controller brings
down planeload after planeload of frozen
people from outer space.
The grass and the flowers - here's where we land.
The grass has a green supervisor
I report to him.
That the two empires are at such variance to each other, Tranströmer, seemingly numbed, writes poems that at times feels scared before the shock of the sublime. Shakespeare's gardens hang heavy with fruit to snatch and enjoy; Basho finds comedy in watching the long rainfall rise up the long legs of a heron at the edge of a pond ("have we really been staring at each other this long?" he asks), which showed for both of them they were at peace with the world's bounty. Tranströmer, like Wallace Stevens before him, or those writing today like Marzanna Kielar from Poland (who had stated pre-Nobel she admires Tranströmer), Mari Kashiwagi from Japan, or Philippe Jaccottet from France, don't convey that much movement in their landscapes; they sense they do harm to the sacred vessel; they write like they fear their powers as poets.
THE HALF-FINISHED HEAVEN
Despondency breaks off its course.
Anguish breaks off its course.
The vulture breaks off its flight.
The eager light streams out,
even the ghosts take a drink.
And our paintings see daylight,
our red beasts of the ice-age studios.
Everything begins to look around.
We walk in the sun in hundreds.
Each man is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.
The endless ground under us.
The water is shining among the trees.
The lake is a window into the earth.
The poems are expansive, capacious, they see much. I only wish they weren't so shocked into being. Take it from Shakespeare, the world is large and terrifying and too complex to comprehend. That's what makes it so beautiful. You are not a god, and that's obvious. Groups of people pass before Tranströmer's or Stevens's eyes and all they can see are the undifferentiated, a mob, a mass of people heading for the grave. Sometimes I feel like yelling at them: then individualize them! Or to quote Tranströmer himself in the final line of this poem, Proceed! Go for it! Make them real (for crissakes)!
THE STATION
A train has rolled in. Carriage after carriage stands,
but no doors open, no one gets off or on.
Are there no doors to be found at all? In there it is crowded
with locked-in people who are moving to and fro.
They are staring out through the immovable windows.
And outside a man goes along the train with a hammer.
He strikes on the wheels, which toll faintly. Except right here!
Here the ringing swells incomprehensibly: a thunderclap,
a cathedral-bells-sound, a world-circumnavigating-sound,
that lifts the whole train and the neighborhood's wet stones.
Everything is singing. You will remember this. Proceed!
Want to read
September 16, 2009Book stolen from me as I slept on a pew
In Chicago's Union Station, in 1992.
In Chicago's Union Station, in 1992.
October 9, 2021
I can see why they gave him the Nobel Prize. Pretty heady stuff, amazing gift for fresh, gorgeous metaphors. Won’t easily forget this one.
Read
May 2, 2012Tomas Transtromer is an absolutely stunning poet. His writing has this icy, clear-eyed precision about it. At times it makes you feel literally chilled, like jumping into a cold ocean, or sucking in a freezing breath on a winter morning. The striking immediacy that rings through his work (some of which was written way back in the 1950's) is something that few writers or poets can pull off. He forces you to reckon with reality in a more direct and fundamental way by showing you what someone can express when they deal with their experiences with integrity, humility and awe. He absolutely deserved that Nobel prize.
March 3, 2012
I love these poems. Transtomer to me is like a long lost and endeared older brother or uncle. The poems do miraculous things with, Neruda like, a simplicity that never baffles. I love this book.
January 28, 2014
Late in this collection of poems lives “Carillon” and late in that poem you find the perfect line to describe Transtromer’s poetry:
No one decides where I go, least of all myself, though each step is where it must be.
The images are stark and mystical. They poems are modern and at times surreal, yet it is difficult to place a date on them. These poems do not at first strike you…they seep into you. Once there, they fix themselves to your memory and you do not forget them. In short, this is a great volume of poetry.
Transtromer does not explore new and unique forms. His focus is on everyday things, linked mystically and with exceptional language. My favorites in this collection, as usual, are not his most famous. Below are those that I think are representative of the collection as a whole.
Stones
Stones that we have thrown I hear
falling, glass-clear through the years. In the valley
fly the moment’s chaotic
acts shrieking from
treetop to treetop. Made mute
in thinner air than that of the present, they glide
like swallows over the mountain
and mountain, until they
reach the farthest plains
at the edges of existence. There fall
all our deeds
glass-clear
to no bottom
except within ourselves.
Balakirev’s Dream
The black grand piano, the shiny spider,
trembled in the center of its net of music.
In the concert hall was conjured a land
where the stones were no heavier than dew.
But Balakirev fell asleep during the music
and dreamed a dream about the Tsar’s droshky.
It wheeled out over the cobblestones
straight into the crow-cawing dark.
He sat alone in the carriage, looking out,
at the same time he ran beside it on the road.
He knew the journey had been long,
and his watch showed years, not hours.
There was a field where the plow lay
and the plow was a fallen bird.
There was an inlet where the vessel lay
icebound, lights out, the crew on deck.
The droshky raced out on the ice, the wheels
spun and spun with the sound of silk.
A minor man-of-war: Sevastopol.
He stood on board. The crew came forward.
“Your life is spared if you can play.”
They showed him a fabulous instrument.
It was like a tuba or a phonograph
or part of some unknown engine.
Helpless with fear, he understood: this
was the piston that drove the man-of-war.
He turned and faced the nearest sailor,
made desperate signs with his hands, and begged:
“Make the sign of the cross, make the cross!”
The sailor’s eyes turned sad as a blind man’s,
his arms stretched out, his head dropped forward—
there he hung as if nailed in the air.
The drums beat. The drums beat. Applause!
Balakirev woke up from his dream.
Wings of applause flapped in the hall.
He saw the man at the grand get up.
In the street was a blackout because of the strike.
Droshkies wheeled by swiftly in the night.
From the Mountain
I stand on the mountain and look across the bay.
The boats rest on the surface of summer.
“We are sleepwalkers. Moons adrift.”
So say the white sails.
“We slip through a sleeping house.
We gently open the doors.
We lean towards freedom.”
So say the white sails.
Once I saw the wills of the world sailing.
They held the same course—one single fleet.
“We are dispersed now. No one’s escort.”
So say the white sails.
Guard Duty
I’m ordered out to a big hump of stones
as if I were an aristocratic corpse from the Iron Age.
The rest are still back in the tent sleeping,
stretched out like spokes in a wheel.
In the tent the stove is boss: it is a big snake
that swallows a ball of fire and hisses.
But it is silent out here in the spring night
among chill stones waiting for the dawn.
Out here in the cold I start to fly
like a shaman, straight to her body—
some places pale from her swimming suit.
The sun shone right on us. The moss was hot.
I brush along the side of warm moments,
but I can’t stay there long.
I’m whistled back through space—
I crawl among the stones. Back to here and now.
Task: to be where I am.
Even when I’m in this solumn and absurd
role: I am still the place
where creation works on itself.
Dawn comes, the sparse tree trunks
take on color now, the frostbitten
forest flowers form a silent search party
after something that has disappeared in the dark.
But to be where I am . . . and to wait.
I am full of anxiety, obstinate, confused.
Things not yet happened are already here!
I feel that. They’re just out there:
a murmuring mass outside the barrier.
They can only slip in one by one.
They want to slip in. Why? They do
one by one. I am the turnstile.
The II verse of Black Postcards:
In the middle of life it happens that death comes
and takes your measurements. This visit
is forgotten and life goes on. But the suit is
sewn in the silence.
No one decides where I go, least of all myself, though each step is where it must be.
The images are stark and mystical. They poems are modern and at times surreal, yet it is difficult to place a date on them. These poems do not at first strike you…they seep into you. Once there, they fix themselves to your memory and you do not forget them. In short, this is a great volume of poetry.
Transtromer does not explore new and unique forms. His focus is on everyday things, linked mystically and with exceptional language. My favorites in this collection, as usual, are not his most famous. Below are those that I think are representative of the collection as a whole.
Stones
Stones that we have thrown I hear
falling, glass-clear through the years. In the valley
fly the moment’s chaotic
acts shrieking from
treetop to treetop. Made mute
in thinner air than that of the present, they glide
like swallows over the mountain
and mountain, until they
reach the farthest plains
at the edges of existence. There fall
all our deeds
glass-clear
to no bottom
except within ourselves.
Balakirev’s Dream
The black grand piano, the shiny spider,
trembled in the center of its net of music.
In the concert hall was conjured a land
where the stones were no heavier than dew.
But Balakirev fell asleep during the music
and dreamed a dream about the Tsar’s droshky.
It wheeled out over the cobblestones
straight into the crow-cawing dark.
He sat alone in the carriage, looking out,
at the same time he ran beside it on the road.
He knew the journey had been long,
and his watch showed years, not hours.
There was a field where the plow lay
and the plow was a fallen bird.
There was an inlet where the vessel lay
icebound, lights out, the crew on deck.
The droshky raced out on the ice, the wheels
spun and spun with the sound of silk.
A minor man-of-war: Sevastopol.
He stood on board. The crew came forward.
“Your life is spared if you can play.”
They showed him a fabulous instrument.
It was like a tuba or a phonograph
or part of some unknown engine.
Helpless with fear, he understood: this
was the piston that drove the man-of-war.
He turned and faced the nearest sailor,
made desperate signs with his hands, and begged:
“Make the sign of the cross, make the cross!”
The sailor’s eyes turned sad as a blind man’s,
his arms stretched out, his head dropped forward—
there he hung as if nailed in the air.
The drums beat. The drums beat. Applause!
Balakirev woke up from his dream.
Wings of applause flapped in the hall.
He saw the man at the grand get up.
In the street was a blackout because of the strike.
Droshkies wheeled by swiftly in the night.
From the Mountain
I stand on the mountain and look across the bay.
The boats rest on the surface of summer.
“We are sleepwalkers. Moons adrift.”
So say the white sails.
“We slip through a sleeping house.
We gently open the doors.
We lean towards freedom.”
So say the white sails.
Once I saw the wills of the world sailing.
They held the same course—one single fleet.
“We are dispersed now. No one’s escort.”
So say the white sails.
Guard Duty
I’m ordered out to a big hump of stones
as if I were an aristocratic corpse from the Iron Age.
The rest are still back in the tent sleeping,
stretched out like spokes in a wheel.
In the tent the stove is boss: it is a big snake
that swallows a ball of fire and hisses.
But it is silent out here in the spring night
among chill stones waiting for the dawn.
Out here in the cold I start to fly
like a shaman, straight to her body—
some places pale from her swimming suit.
The sun shone right on us. The moss was hot.
I brush along the side of warm moments,
but I can’t stay there long.
I’m whistled back through space—
I crawl among the stones. Back to here and now.
Task: to be where I am.
Even when I’m in this solumn and absurd
role: I am still the place
where creation works on itself.
Dawn comes, the sparse tree trunks
take on color now, the frostbitten
forest flowers form a silent search party
after something that has disappeared in the dark.
But to be where I am . . . and to wait.
I am full of anxiety, obstinate, confused.
Things not yet happened are already here!
I feel that. They’re just out there:
a murmuring mass outside the barrier.
They can only slip in one by one.
They want to slip in. Why? They do
one by one. I am the turnstile.
The II verse of Black Postcards:
In the middle of life it happens that death comes
and takes your measurements. This visit
is forgotten and life goes on. But the suit is
sewn in the silence.
October 16, 2025
Was going to give this 3 stars until I read the line "my skeleton is handing in its resignation".
April 28, 2013
In the Nile Delta
The young wife wept over her food
in the hotel after a day in the city
where she saw the sick creep and huddle
and children bound to die of want.
She and her husband went to their room.
Sprinkled water to settle the dirt.
Lay on their separate beds with few words.
She fell in a deep sleep. He lay awake.
Out in the darkness a great noise ran past.
Murmers, tramping, cries, carts, songs.
All in want. Never came to a stop.
And he sank in sleep curled in a No.
A dream came. He was on a voyage.
In the grey water a movement swirled
And a voice said: ‘There is one who is good.
There is one who can see all without hating.
----
"Each man is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone."
-Tomas Transtromer
The young wife wept over her food
in the hotel after a day in the city
where she saw the sick creep and huddle
and children bound to die of want.
She and her husband went to their room.
Sprinkled water to settle the dirt.
Lay on their separate beds with few words.
She fell in a deep sleep. He lay awake.
Out in the darkness a great noise ran past.
Murmers, tramping, cries, carts, songs.
All in want. Never came to a stop.
And he sank in sleep curled in a No.
A dream came. He was on a voyage.
In the grey water a movement swirled
And a voice said: ‘There is one who is good.
There is one who can see all without hating.
----
"Each man is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone."
-Tomas Transtromer
April 2, 2008
I fell in love with Transtromer's poetry when I was in college. His poem Kyrie has influenced two of my poems in my book The Last Time We Were Children. I highly recommend this poet!
June 10, 2009
Vertiginous insights in mundane contexts; a great combination.
Currently reading
November 9, 2009holy smokes. especially more rad because his name rhymes with transformers.
May 4, 2015
well he didn't receive a Novel, I mean Noble prize for nothing, but don't take my word for it, read the book!
October 8, 2016
This won the Nobel Prize. Sigh.
November 15, 2016
I love is books, love his poems & love him.
November 24, 2014
I love being clumsy. I love stumbling into, onto, near a poet this simply awesome. I love the translation, these are poems you KNOW were written in another language, and lose nothing in English because the translators keep a little awkwardness to remind you. I was and still am stunned when I think when these poems were written; ages and ages ago (50’s, 60’s, 70’s) but feel as real and immediate as the now. Of course, they evoke Sweden in winter, of course, of course; but they also are written by a psychologist so they go deep and I confess, that does it for me. (EPILOGUE) Not just, woe is me, the wind blows me over in bone chilling cold, but this frantic symphonic imagery of this ship, this twilight, this darkness and shadow and WAIT, some imagery of the glorious fecund lush summer then back to the wind and the clouds reeling in desperation and of course, a psychologist knows the soul feels it too. Poetry can be deep and lush and meaningful without depression, and now I know Swedish poetry can be that as well.
Half-mad, lost walking it is a kind of prayer… (OUT IN THE OPEN)
Fantastic to feel how my poem grows/while I myself shrink./It is growing, it takes my place. (MORNING BIRDS)
I brush along the side of warm moments,/but I can’t stay there long./I’m whistled back though space-/I crawl along the stones. Back to here and now.//Task: to be where I am… (GUARD DUTY)
Tired of all who come with words, words but no language/I went to the snow-covered island./The wild does not have words./The unwritten pages spread themselves in all directions!/I come across the marks of roe-deer’s hooves in the snow./Language but no words. (FROM MARCH ’79)
EPILOGUE (excerpt)
December, Sweden is a hauled-up,
Unrigged ship. Her masts stand stark
In the twilight. And twilight lasts longer
Than day. The way here is stony:
Daylight waits until noon
To reveal winter’s coliseum,
Lit by unreal clouds…
The sea gropes at heaven’s root,
Preoccupied and as if listening to something.
(Obscure journeys over the soul’s dark,
Half-averted the bird that could arouse
The sleeper with its chirp. Then the glass
Is shifted, showing another time:
It is summer, the mountains bellow, swollen
With light, the brook carries the sun’s glitter
In its transparent hand….But all vanishes,
As when a filmstrip ends in the dark.)
Now the evening star burns through cloud.
Trees, fences, and houses grow, grow larger
With the dark’s soundless, steepening fall.
And under the star is outlined clear and clearer
The other, secret landscape that lives
The life of contour on night’s X-ray plate.
A shadow draws its sled between the houses.
They wait.
Six p.m. and the wind comes
Springing with its noise along the street,
Bursting into the dark like a pack of horsemen.
How the black disruption jangles, then dies down.
Dancing in place, the houses stand, stricken
In this roar that is like a dream’s. Gust
After gust sweeps over the bay, and out
To the open sea that casts itself into darkness.
Overhead the stars flash desperately,
Switched on and off by racing clouds
Which, only when they veil the light, reveal
Their presence, like those clouds of the past
That wander through the soul…
STONES
Stones that we have thrown I hear
Falling, glass-clear through the years. In the valley
Fly the moment’s chaotic
Acts shrieking from
Treetop to treetop. Made mute
In thinner air than that of the present, they glide
Like swallows over mountain
And mountain, until they
Reach the farthest plains
At the edges of existence. There fall
All our deeds
Glass-clear
To no bottom
Except within ourselves.
ELEGY
…Unmoving woods, unmoving water surface
And stretching from the earth the orchid’s hand.
Beyond this channel, on the other side
But in the same reflections hung, The Ship,
As weightlessly a cloud hangs in its space.
And around its stern the water’s motionless,
Lying in a calm. And still it storms!
…There is a silence when the radar turns
Its circles upon circles in despair.
A crossroad is contained within a moment.
The music of what is distant streams and joins.
All grown together in a bushy tree.
Lost cities shining in its foliage.
In every parish murmurs the marksman’s pipe
When at the point of midnight wings are spread
And in it fall the past begins to grow
And darker than the meteor of the heart.
The world’s calm is reflected in the evening,
When all the bows are lifted but don’t move.
Immovable in mist the forest’s trees
The watery tundra that reflects itself.
Music’s mute half, like the smell of resin
From the thunder-injured spruce is here.
A summer underground for every man.
A shadow breaks free a the crossroads there
And following Bach’s trumpet gallops off.
Now confidence is given out of grace.
To leave one’s self-disguise there on the shore
Where rollers break and ebb away, break
And ebb away.
KYRIE
Sometimes my life opened its eyes in the dark.
A feeling as if crowds drew through the streets
In blindness and anxiety on the way towards a miracle
While I invisibly remain standing.
As the child falls asleep in terror
Listening to the heart’s heavy tread.
Slowly, slowly until morning puts its rays in the locks
And the doors of darkness opens.
NOVEMBER LUSTER OF PRECIOUS FURS
Precisely because the sky is gray
The ground itself becomes luminous:
The fields with their shy green,
And the blood-bread-colored soil.
There is the red wall of a barn.
And there are meadows under water
Like shining rice fields in some Asia-
Where sea gulls land and reminisce.
Haze-filled spaces in the forest
Gently ringing as they touch,
An inspiration that lives hidden
And flees into the forest like Nils Dacke.
OUT IN THE OPEN
Sun burning. The plane comes in low
Throwing a shadow shaped like a giant cross that rushes over the ground.
A man is sitting in the field poking at something.
The shadow arrives.
For a fraction of a second he is right in the center of the cross.
I have seen the cross hanging the cool church vaults.
At times it resembles a split-second snapshot of something
Moving at tremendous speed.
FURTHER IN
On the main road into the city
when the sun is low.
The traffic thickens, crawls.
It is a sluggish dragon glittering.
I am one of the dragon’s scales.
Suddenly the red sun is
right in the middle of the windscreen
streaming in.
I am transparent
and writing becomes visible
inside me
words in invisible ink
which appear
when the paper is held to the fire!
I know I must get far away
straight through the city and then
further until it is time to go out
and walk far in the forest.
Walk in the footprints of the badger.
It gets dark, difficult to see.
In there on the moss lie stones.
One of the stones is precious.
It can change everything
it can make the darkness shine.
It is a switch for the whole country.
Everything depends on it.
Look at it, touch it…
Half-mad, lost walking it is a kind of prayer… (OUT IN THE OPEN)
Fantastic to feel how my poem grows/while I myself shrink./It is growing, it takes my place. (MORNING BIRDS)
I brush along the side of warm moments,/but I can’t stay there long./I’m whistled back though space-/I crawl along the stones. Back to here and now.//Task: to be where I am… (GUARD DUTY)
Tired of all who come with words, words but no language/I went to the snow-covered island./The wild does not have words./The unwritten pages spread themselves in all directions!/I come across the marks of roe-deer’s hooves in the snow./Language but no words. (FROM MARCH ’79)
EPILOGUE (excerpt)
December, Sweden is a hauled-up,
Unrigged ship. Her masts stand stark
In the twilight. And twilight lasts longer
Than day. The way here is stony:
Daylight waits until noon
To reveal winter’s coliseum,
Lit by unreal clouds…
The sea gropes at heaven’s root,
Preoccupied and as if listening to something.
(Obscure journeys over the soul’s dark,
Half-averted the bird that could arouse
The sleeper with its chirp. Then the glass
Is shifted, showing another time:
It is summer, the mountains bellow, swollen
With light, the brook carries the sun’s glitter
In its transparent hand….But all vanishes,
As when a filmstrip ends in the dark.)
Now the evening star burns through cloud.
Trees, fences, and houses grow, grow larger
With the dark’s soundless, steepening fall.
And under the star is outlined clear and clearer
The other, secret landscape that lives
The life of contour on night’s X-ray plate.
A shadow draws its sled between the houses.
They wait.
Six p.m. and the wind comes
Springing with its noise along the street,
Bursting into the dark like a pack of horsemen.
How the black disruption jangles, then dies down.
Dancing in place, the houses stand, stricken
In this roar that is like a dream’s. Gust
After gust sweeps over the bay, and out
To the open sea that casts itself into darkness.
Overhead the stars flash desperately,
Switched on and off by racing clouds
Which, only when they veil the light, reveal
Their presence, like those clouds of the past
That wander through the soul…
STONES
Stones that we have thrown I hear
Falling, glass-clear through the years. In the valley
Fly the moment’s chaotic
Acts shrieking from
Treetop to treetop. Made mute
In thinner air than that of the present, they glide
Like swallows over mountain
And mountain, until they
Reach the farthest plains
At the edges of existence. There fall
All our deeds
Glass-clear
To no bottom
Except within ourselves.
ELEGY
…Unmoving woods, unmoving water surface
And stretching from the earth the orchid’s hand.
Beyond this channel, on the other side
But in the same reflections hung, The Ship,
As weightlessly a cloud hangs in its space.
And around its stern the water’s motionless,
Lying in a calm. And still it storms!
…There is a silence when the radar turns
Its circles upon circles in despair.
A crossroad is contained within a moment.
The music of what is distant streams and joins.
All grown together in a bushy tree.
Lost cities shining in its foliage.
In every parish murmurs the marksman’s pipe
When at the point of midnight wings are spread
And in it fall the past begins to grow
And darker than the meteor of the heart.
The world’s calm is reflected in the evening,
When all the bows are lifted but don’t move.
Immovable in mist the forest’s trees
The watery tundra that reflects itself.
Music’s mute half, like the smell of resin
From the thunder-injured spruce is here.
A summer underground for every man.
A shadow breaks free a the crossroads there
And following Bach’s trumpet gallops off.
Now confidence is given out of grace.
To leave one’s self-disguise there on the shore
Where rollers break and ebb away, break
And ebb away.
KYRIE
Sometimes my life opened its eyes in the dark.
A feeling as if crowds drew through the streets
In blindness and anxiety on the way towards a miracle
While I invisibly remain standing.
As the child falls asleep in terror
Listening to the heart’s heavy tread.
Slowly, slowly until morning puts its rays in the locks
And the doors of darkness opens.
NOVEMBER LUSTER OF PRECIOUS FURS
Precisely because the sky is gray
The ground itself becomes luminous:
The fields with their shy green,
And the blood-bread-colored soil.
There is the red wall of a barn.
And there are meadows under water
Like shining rice fields in some Asia-
Where sea gulls land and reminisce.
Haze-filled spaces in the forest
Gently ringing as they touch,
An inspiration that lives hidden
And flees into the forest like Nils Dacke.
OUT IN THE OPEN
Sun burning. The plane comes in low
Throwing a shadow shaped like a giant cross that rushes over the ground.
A man is sitting in the field poking at something.
The shadow arrives.
For a fraction of a second he is right in the center of the cross.
I have seen the cross hanging the cool church vaults.
At times it resembles a split-second snapshot of something
Moving at tremendous speed.
FURTHER IN
On the main road into the city
when the sun is low.
The traffic thickens, crawls.
It is a sluggish dragon glittering.
I am one of the dragon’s scales.
Suddenly the red sun is
right in the middle of the windscreen
streaming in.
I am transparent
and writing becomes visible
inside me
words in invisible ink
which appear
when the paper is held to the fire!
I know I must get far away
straight through the city and then
further until it is time to go out
and walk far in the forest.
Walk in the footprints of the badger.
It gets dark, difficult to see.
In there on the moss lie stones.
One of the stones is precious.
It can change everything
it can make the darkness shine.
It is a switch for the whole country.
Everything depends on it.
Look at it, touch it…
June 25, 2017
My friend Tim pulled this from a shelf of a bookstore in Manhattan and made me promise I'd read it with him. I flaked. Now reading a year later. Transtromer's poems are quiet, concentrated. He unfolds scenes patiently. Metaphor isn't used to eject the reader into a different given (which is fine if it does!) but to deepen, extend his subjects. An ordinary example: "The bus crawls through winter dusk / like a ship aglow among pines / where the road is a narrow, deep, dead canal" (72). As most do, poems that were image-heavy mystical landscapes didn't do as much for me as those, often in his later books, that also risked propositions ("Each man is a half-open door / leading to a room for a everyone" (maybe. let me think about it. see if the rest of the poem helps convince me...)) or those that take into account human nature: "But those who glance with furtive jealousy at men of action, those who secretly despise themselves for not being murderers, they don't recognize themselves here" (144). This isn't because I privilege the human but its often when the human appears that the stuff of Transtromer's poems go beyond being shells for some quiet, immanent x. Many of these are quiet lovely ("Solitary Swedish Houses" reads like a thesis statement for his early career)--but I can't afford to love sleepy poems right now. Wonder how Tim is.
May 25, 2020
Seldom has a book of translated poetry struck such a chord.
The very first line of the very first poem had me: Prelude // Awakening is a parachute jump from the dream. I knew, then, I was in thrall to a Master. What a wonderful introduction. My only complaint is I don't read Swedish, and I would love to read these in the original.
When I'm involved in a good book of poetry, I often find myself underling special lines, marking poems I really like, that speak to me in whole or in part. I'm guessing 50% of the poems in this book affected me so, such as these lines from The Gallery:
Because the margins will finally rise
over their edges
and drown the text.
It happens, but seldom,
that one of us really sees the other.
It is his life, it is his labyrinth.
I look forward to finding and reading more of his work.
The very first line of the very first poem had me: Prelude // Awakening is a parachute jump from the dream. I knew, then, I was in thrall to a Master. What a wonderful introduction. My only complaint is I don't read Swedish, and I would love to read these in the original.
When I'm involved in a good book of poetry, I often find myself underling special lines, marking poems I really like, that speak to me in whole or in part. I'm guessing 50% of the poems in this book affected me so, such as these lines from The Gallery:
Because the margins will finally rise
over their edges
and drown the text.
It happens, but seldom,
that one of us really sees the other.
It is his life, it is his labyrinth.
I look forward to finding and reading more of his work.
June 4, 2022
I read a lot of poetry. In fact we have more poetry than most bookstores. But I just could not get into this book. Pastoral poetry is great but for me it needs to make the connection between the universal to the specific and this just does not. I am not academic so I maybe missing something. It is rare when I don't finish a book.
November 4, 2022
Reading poetry in translation is always A Whole Big Thing but at least this team of translators and their poet-editor have preserved many striking images and moods. I guess I don’t know enough about Scandinavian poetry in general and Tranströmer specifically to comment on the many times he veers away from verse and into prose but I think the mix is beneficial overall.
September 25, 2024
A rabbit hole!!! Any poem by Tranströmer can stretch essentially infinitely (they do not have limits). My problem was with organization because all of the translators are mixed together and then the poems are printed without the translator listed. The reading experience is closer to decoding an esoteric cipher than ruminating on the work
August 17, 2019
I love the imagery, the sense of place, the subversion, the dreaminess of these poems.
December 11, 2019
Tremendous. Starting over to read it again.
April 12, 2021
There might be something here, but I definitely missed it
September 5, 2021
sings the body salaried
February 18, 2022
Disappointing. Hard to understand how he got the prize, apart from the fact that he was in the Academy. Medals for mates.
October 13, 2024
Love the way in which Tranströmer brings in and depicts the natural world in what seems like most of his poetry here.
March 4, 2025
Wonderful
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