Combining poetry and a memoir of his childhood in Sweden in one volume, For the Living and the Dead once again demonstrates Tomas Tranströmer’s gift for capturing and grounding the elusive, luminous details of our modern world. A work that bridges the space between those real and unreal elements of life, it suggests that a surprising, redemptive cohesion can exist within a universe of opposing forces.

For the Living and the Dead: Poems and a Memoir

Literature & Fiction

Tranströmer, Tomas

Poetry

Ecco

Over the course of his career, Tomas Tranströmer - a poet who could look on the barren isolation of Sweden's landscapes and seascapes like no other, and find in them something hauntingly transcendent - emerged as one of the 20th century's essential global voices. By the time he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011, his luminous, almost mystical work had been translated into more than 50 languages.\nGathering his poems from the early, nature-focused work to the later poetry's widening of the scope to take in painting, travel, urban life, and the impositions of technology on the natural world, and stirred throughout by the poet's profound love of music, The Half-Finished Heaven is a unique selection from Tranströmer's work. It is also, in its way, a deeply intimate one: the poems hand-picked here are not only the most beloved, but also those which were translated in the course of Tranströmer's nearly thirty-year correspondence with his close friend and collaborator, the American poet Robert Bly. Few names are more strongly associated with Tranströmer's; and few people have understood not only his poetry, but the processes behind it, more profoundly. The result is perhaps the best English-language introduction to this great and strange poet's work that there could be.

Half-Finished Heaven

Penguin Classics

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.

The Deleted World: Poems

History & Criticism

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Swedish by Samuel Charters. In 1974 Tomas Tranströmer (winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature) published his groundbreaking collection BALTICS (Östersjöar). In this book-length poem, Tranströmer creates a literal and figurative landscape where his family history becomes the psychological, perhaps even the spiritual, history of the poet himself. Time, geography, a family, an island, a country, the labor of seamanship—these elements, and so many more, show a voice whose multiplicities and conjunctions intertwine to resemble something like the layers of a symphony, a symphony of narrative, of the minimal, the liminal, the image, collisions, and fragments. BALTICS, as its plural name suggests, is an experiment in the conflation of time, a theme that has come to define Tranströmer's career as a poet. In 1975 Samuel Charters published the seminal translation of Baltics with Oyez. Out of print for nearly 40 years, this new edition contains a revised translation, a new afterword and translator's note, and a series of photographs taken by Ann Charters. This definitive, bilingual edition of BALTICS is sure to delight longtime Tranströmer fans and new readers alike."It is especially moving to me now, with Tomas Tranströmer having just won the Nobel Prize in Literature, to have the generous and far-reaching BALTICS available again, and in such a keen translation. Tomas Tranströmer leaves an indelible mark upon readers everywhere. The gifts of his poems are offered generously and without conditions. I cannot think of another poet who has left more lasting impressions—impressions which never cease, but instead keep creating new spheres of realities and imaginations. He is constantly a poet of nearness. We need Tomas Tranströmer's poetry as much, if not more, in this 21st century as we needed it in the 20th century."—Michael Burkard

Baltics

Oyez Pub

For the Living & the Dead

Deane, John F.

Dufour Editions

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."

The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems

New Directions

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

History

Text: English, Swedish (translation)

Windows and Stones: Selected Poems

Univ of Pittsburgh Pr

Windows and Stones: Selected Poems (Pitt Poetry Series)

University of Pittsburgh Press

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.

Tomas Transtromer: Selected Poems, 1954-1986

United States

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Books by Tranströmer, Tomas