New Collected Poems

Tomas Transtromer won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature. He 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 three later collections, For Living and Dead (1989), The Sad Gondola (1996) and The Great Enigma (2004), and 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 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.

ISBN 1852244135   Pages 256 ISBN13 9781852244132 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Bloodaxe Books Ltd   Weight (grammes) 341 Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd   Published in Tyne and Wear Format Paperback   Previous ISBN 9781852240233 Publication date 01 Jan 1987   Height (mm) 216 Translator Robin Fulton   Width (mm) 138 Library of Congress PT9876.3.R   Spine width (mm) 14 DEWEY 839.7174   Academic level General DEWEY edition DC21

		Prelude		21
		Autumnal Archipelago		21
		Five Stanzas to Thoreau		22
		Gogol		23
		Sailor's Yarn		24
		Strophe and Counter-Strophe		25
		Agitated Meditation		25
		The Stones		26
		Context		26
		Morning Approach		27
		There is Peace in the Surging Prow		27
		Midnight Turning Point		28
		Song		28
		Elegy		31
		Epilogue		34
		Solitary Swedish Houses		39
		The Man who Awoke with Singing over the Roofs		40
		Weather Picture		40
		The Four Temperaments		41
		Caprichos		42
		Siesta		43
		Izmir at Three O'Clock		43
		Secrets on the Way		44
		Tracks		44
		Kyrie		45
		A Man from Benin		45
		Balakirev's Dream		47
		After an Attack		48
		The Journey's Formulae		49
		The Couple		53
		The Tree and the Sky		53
		Face to Face		54
		Ringing		54
		More...

'Fulton's translation from the Swedish is excellent: a poet of exceptional achievement has with this volume been born into English' - Guardian. 'In its delicate hovering between the responsibilities of the social world and the invitations of a world of possibly numinous reality, Tomas Transtromer's poetry permits us to be happily certain of our own uncertainties - Like the animals in Rilke's first sonnet to Orpheus, they are alive to the god's music which 'makes a temple deep inside their hearing' - Seamus Heaney.

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