New Collected Poems

The bilingual e-book with audio edition of this book presents Tomas Tranströmer’s Swedish texts from Dikter och prosa 1954-2004 (Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2011) with Robin Fulton’s English translations from the 2011 expanded edition of his New Collected Poems. The audio files are from recordings of readings made by Tranströmer in 1990, from the CD-set Tomas Tranströmer läser 82 dikter ur 10 bocker 1954-1996 (Bonnier Audio, 2006), and from another recording of a reading Tranströmer made of the whole of Östersjöar (Balti) for Bokbandet, originally released on cassette in 1990 and then as a CD in 1997. In addition, the audio files for poems from Den stora gåtan (The Great Enigma) are from recordings made by Krister Henriksson for the the CD Tomas Tranströmer: Den stora gåtan (Bonnier Audio, 2004). Tomas Tranströmer (1931-2015) was Sweden’s most important poet of the past fifty years. This book contains all the poems he wrote, 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. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011. In Sweden he was called a ‘buzzard poet’ because his haunting, visionary poetry shows the world from a height, in a mystic dimension, but brought 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. Tranströmer was born in Stockholm, where he grew up, but spent many long summers on the island of Runmarö 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 worked with Tomas Tranströmer on each of his collections as they were published over many years, which 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 Tranströmer’s poetry published in English, but Fulton’s prize-winning translation is the most authoritative and comprehensive edition of his poetry published anywhere.