The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The collected poems of one of the world's greatest living writers, Tomas Transtromer, available in this comprehensive edition.
In day's first hours consciousness can grasp the world
as 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."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The major contemporary poet of Scandinavia, and a perennial Nobel Prize candidate (so rumor has it), Transtr mer and his compact, sometimes grim lyricism have long enjoyed a serious following in the United States. This version from the Scot Fulton (whose first Transtr mer selection appeared in 1987) contains everything Transtr mer has published in book form. Transtr mer's preferred land- and seascapes, drawn from the "spruce-clad coastland" of his native Sweden, have not changed much over his 50-year career: flat seas and frosty storms, swarming birds and contrapuntally beautiful summers, from which "society's dark hull drifts further and further away." His forms, however, have varied impressively: Sapphic stanzas, haiku, imagist lyric, prose sketches and several-page sequences all speak to one another. A clear competitor to Bly's well-received The Half-Finished Heaven (2001), this more comprehensive collection concludes with the rarely seen short poems of Transtr mer's recent years. Some will note political undercurrents ("The language marches in step with the executioners./ Therefore we must get a new language"), yet Transtr mer's dominant moods are almost warily inward-turning while given to hope: "I find myself in the deep corridor/ that would have been dark," the poet declares, "if my right hand wasn't shining like a torch."
