A round-up at Literary Hub of seven books by Jen Campbell, Nick Flynn, Ishion Hutchinson, Kelly Rowe, Timmy Straw, Tao Yuanming, and Tomas Tranströmer contains this encapsulation of Tranströmer’s oeuvre:
Tomas Tranströmer, The Blue House: Collected Works of Tomas Tranströmer
(translated by Patty Crane)
(Copper Canyon Press)
“And now it’s happening,” Tomas Tranströmer wrote, “the fragments are ying together, the mosaic appears.” Across the fourteen volumes translated here, Tranströmer (1931-2015) assembled a poetic mosaic as various as a well-contemplated life could be and “atjust the right distance / from reality.” Known for compressed perceptions that capture numinous mysteries within the ranges of ordinary life (“The divine brushes up against a person and lights a flame / but then draws back. / Why?”), he found deceptively simple but brilliant ways to suggest the intersection of a grand natural order with the mundanely human, as when a walk in the “colorblind dark” conjures what the present feels like to a middle-aged person: “A time span / several minutes long /fifty-eight years wide.”
While some of his most beautiful poems explicate sad themes like the isolation of an ailing child (“After a Seizure”) and the bleak advent of a Swedish winter (“Winter’s Glance”), Tranströmer dismantled any Scandinavian stereotype of lugubrious alienation, finding the countervailing value within the despair (“You drank the darkness / and became visible”) or celebrating ordinary pleasures like espresso: “the black droplets of deep insight / sometimes intercepted by the soul.” Patty Crane’s beautifully judged translation fulfills the need for a version of Tranströmer in a current, American idiom. A must for the poetry lover’s library.