From the Winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature The contemporary Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer is a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature and has a prestigious worldwide reputation. Robert Bly, a longtime friend and confidant of Tranströmer's, as well as one of his first translators, has carefully chosen and translated the finest of Tranströmer's poems to create this cherished and invaluable collection. Contents Introduction: "Upward into the Depths" by Robert Bly 1 From 17 Poems (1954) Secrets on the Road (1958) The Half-Finished Heaven (1962) Evening—Morning Storm The Man Awakened by a Song above His Roof Track Kyrie After the Attack Balakirev's Dream (1905) The Couple Allegro Lamento The Tree and the Sky A Winter Night Dark Shape Swimming The Half-Finished Heaven Nocturne 2 From Resonance and Footprints (1966) Night Vision (1970) Open and Closed Space From an African Diary Morning Bird Songs Summer Grass About History After a Death Under Pressure Slow Music Out in the Open Solitude Breathing Space July The Open Window s26Preludes The Bookcase Outskirts Going with the Current Traffic Night Duty A Few Moments The Name Standing Up 3 From Pathways (1973) Truth Barriers (1978) Elegy The Scattered Congregation Snow-Melting Time, '66 Further In Late May December Evening, '72 Seeing through the Ground Guard Duty Along the Lines (Far North) At Funchal (Island of Madeira) Calling Home Citoyens For Mats and Laila After a Long Dry Spell A Place in the Woods Street Crossing Below Freezing Start of a Late Autumn Novel From the Winter of 1947 The Clearing Schubertiana 4 From The Wild Market Square (1983) For the Living and the Dead (1989) Grief Gondola (1996) From March '79 Fire Script Black Postcards Romanesque Arches The Forgotten Commander Vermeer The Cuckoo The Kingdom of Uncertainty Three Stanzas Two Cities Island Life, 1860 April and Silence Grief Gondola #2
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His 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".
