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The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems

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Tomas Tranströmer is a Swedish poet who is one of the strongest and most frequently honored artists of the time. Robin Fulton has translated and curated the bulk of Tranströmer's published poems in this magnificent book THE GREAT ENIGMA: NEW COLLECTED POEMS and it is a rare treat. In one tome are some of the most moving conversations with and about nature this reader has ever read. Tranströmer's ability to alter the landscape of the sea and the cliffs, the islands and havens, with an imagination that defies comparison: it is a staggering achievement.

Able to succeed in both the very short and the epic form, he finds those niches in our psyches and makes them into words we could never generate. 'It's spring and the air is very strong. I have graduated from
the university of oblivion and am as empty-handed as the shirt
on the clothesline.' Perhaps it is his training and practice as a psychologist that allows his entry into our heads the way few other poets can achieve. A solid (yet one of many equally powerful) examples would be the following 'Sailor's Yarn':

'There are bare winter days when the sea is kin to mountain
country, crouching in grey plumage, a grief minute blue,
long hours with waves like pale lynxes vainly seeking
hold in the beach gravel.

On such a day wrecks might come from the sea searching
for their owners, settling in the town's din, and drowned
crews blow landward, thinner than pipe smoke.

(The real lynxes are in the north, with sharpened claws
and dreaming eyes. In the north, where day lives in
a mine both day and night.

Where the sole survivor may sit at the borealis stove
and listen to the music of those frozen to death.)'

Few collections of poetry are as satisfying as this and to Robin Fulton's translations must go a lot of the credit. This book is stimulus for the adventurous imagination as well as for the lover of great sea songs. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, January 07

How can you write about a poet without quoting? And if he has already achieved such extreme compression of ideas as 2011 Nobelist Tomas Tranströmer has, what can more words add? So I will try to use his own words as much as possible, starting with a complete poem, "Eagle Rock," from his last published collection (The Great Enigma, 2004):

Behind the vivarium glass
the reptiles
unmoving.

A woman hangs up washing
in the silence.
Death is becalmed.

In the depths of the ground
my soul glides
silent as a comet.

How unexpected is that word "comet," a moving body of light in the heavens, challenging the below-ground dark of death! This from a man in his seventies, robbed of the power of speech by a stroke some dozen years before. The brief poems from this last period have not been published in English before this volume, which shows the poet's development from young adulthood to old age. The image of the comet returns again in the book's final section, a prose memoir from 1993 describing his childhood and adolescence, thus bringing the life-cycle full circle: "My life. Thinking these words, I see before me a streak of light... a comet." After talking about youth -- the bright dense head of the comet -- he goes on: "Further back, the comet thins out -- that's the longer part, the tail. It becomes more and more sparse, but also broader. I am now far out in the comet's tail, I am sixty as I write this." The image of racing time returns, as most of his images do, in another poem, "A Page of the Nightbook" (1996): "A period of time / a few minutes long / fifty-eight years wide." And again in the prose-poem "Answers to Letters" (1983): "Sometimes an abyss opens between Tuesday and Wednesday but twenty-six years could pass in a moment."

In his memoir, Tranströmer tells of sitting in Latin class while the students read out verses of Horace one by one then attempted their own halting translations. "This alternation between the trivial and decrepit on the one hand and the buoyant and sublime on the other taught me a lot. It had to do with the conditions of poetry and of life. That through form something could be raised to another level. The caterpillar feet were gone, the wings unfolded." This says a lot for the poet's love of brevity, but it reminds us that the butterfly was once an earthbound caterpillar too. Tranströmer's poems may be surreal at times, but the secrets they hold are by no means arcane; they are as universal as they are personal. His butterfly is no exotic species: "I love that cabbage-white as though it were a fluttering corner of truth itself." (Streets in Shanghai, 1986). The process of translation, which was Tranströmer's first inspiration, poses a special challenge to his translators, but Scottish poet Robin Fulton has been working with him for thirty-five years; his versions have the immediacy of English originals.

Fulton also contributes a most helpful introduction. He half-advises the reader to start at the end, so I did. I thumb back like snapshots in an album. A music-lover consoled by lugubrious Liszt who in his younger days had thrilled to Haydn. A traveler in the cities of many continents, who ends as he had begun, among the heaths, forests, and coastline of his native land. A successful lover walking down the street when "All the question marks began singing of God's being" (C Major, 1962). A young poet arriving on the literary scene like a commando: "Waking up is a parachute descent from dreams" -- the opening line of "Prelude" (1954), the first poem in the collection. But what strikes me most in this retrospective glance is the elegiac nature of so much of Tranströmer's poetry, as though half his life has been spent preparing to write that final full stop. There is the foreboding of his magnificent poem, "Alone" (1966), an account of a near-death experience on an icy road. The trains that cross his landscapes stop without reason, and only sometimes continue on. But nothing expresses it as beautifully or simply as the second of his two "Black Postcards" (1983), in which you almost hear the voice of Emily Dickinson:

In the middle of life it happens that death comes
to take man's measurements. The visit
is forgotten and life goes on. But the suit
is sewn on the quiet.

Unlike many Nobel laureates, Tomas Tranströmer is not a political writer performing on the world stage. He is a private man, a rare one who shares his privacy, and eminently worth reading.

When I first learned that Poet Tomas Transtromer was this year's Nobel Laureate in literature, I was both ecstatic and perplexed--the former because I had another opportunity to read and to respond to what the literary community regaled as this year's crowning achievement, and the latter because I had never heard of him even though I have been reading, writing, and teaching literature most of my adult life.

If you do not remember, last year's winner was Mario Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian writer whose historical fiction novel Feast of the Goat--a story about the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic--set my heart ablaze with his ability to describe poignant historical events. My only minor critique was that his style and content sounded reminiscent of Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

With Tomas Transtromer, there is no real comparison. He has been by far the most original, the most satisfying, and the most complete modern poet (he probably is upset that I have called him modern and a poet!) I have encountered. What is even more impressive about him is that literature has never been his field of study (that would be history, psychology, and amazingly geography)even though he has been writing prodigiously for the last forty years. It is truly fortuitous that the rest of the world now has the opportunity to enter this "silent rebel's mind," for we can benefit from his poetry in so many capacities.

An amateur compared to those who have followed Transtromer's life and works, my prosody may likely sound frenetic for the simple reason that my training has been in English, and, honestly, that is a slight limitation since Transtromer purposely tries to be an atypical poet. What I wish to convey is the approach that I have taken to understand and to enjoy his poems for one must remember that Transtromer envisions the world from the apex of the universe, not the pedestrian sidewalk.

If you are new to Transtromer and lack a solid background in poetry, do not panic. My background could not have prepared me for what I was about to read either. In the foreword Robin Fulton suggests that the reader not attempt to read the text chronologically, as the poems do not necessarily build upon themselves. In an interview Transtromer commented that his later poetry was a reaction to his overly romantic ones in his early twenties, but that does not mean that they are less worthy than what he produced later in his life.

If anything, Transtromer characterizes his youthful poems as too insular or possibly too bound to his home topography. However, strangely enough, when I finished reading the sections 17 Poems and Secrets on the Way, I found myself befuddled at a conscious level but somehow dreaming "better" at an unconscious level, as if the poems' meanings were only clairvoyant during the REM stage of sleep. While some may yearn for this interior struggle, I quickly embraced Fulton's advice and shifted my focus to Transtromer's memoir.

Written in 1993, "Memories Look at Me" is Transtromer's benevolence heaped upon us. It is here where I made my deeper connections and here where I understood that Transtromer does not function as what we think of the "typical" poet. We happen upon his childhood and the fact that his journalist father left his wife and son early on, and, as a result, the young Transtromer grew up poor. There is his grandfather, whose nineteenth century lexicon lingered in his mind; a rich childhood friend who possessed so much while he had so little. It is as if he provides this biography only to tell us what he is not.

Interestingly, of likely lasting impact was his awareness at the age of eight that he was "special" from the other students; for example, he loved touring museums and reading books from the adult section of the library or at his father's party from cover to cover. There is his time in primary and especially secondary school where both teachers and students quickly recognized his geniuses not only in writing but above all in geography!

He may be private today, but some of his adolescence could be characterized as passive-aggressive. During World War II, he recalled how he was thoroughly anti-Nazi even though most of his secondary teachers were ardent supporters. There was his rebellion against one of his teachers who hated that he refused to write conventional poems with proper capitalization (which likely explains the lowercase lettering of the title of his book!) Ultimately, though, there is nothing political, nothing peculiar, and nothing scintillating other than, well, himself. There is the poet, the "great enigmas," and likely a spiritual realm that he describes throughout much of his poetry.

As one can tell from the number of previous paragraphs, there is much to be gained from reading his memoir. The next step is to understand how Transtromer uses a multitude of physical settings and historical events as a springboard into an ironic dream-like awareness of a spiritual transcendence. I hesitate to use the word "routine" because that is misleading, but even Fulton comments that much of Transtromer's poetry starts with the concrete in order to climb toward a "larger context."

The "cycle" of much of Transtromer's poetry is one in which a season--i.e. fall, winter, spring, summer--is invoked, often followed with a specific month such as June, November, December, and February--and then paired with a particular hour such as midnight and two a.m. He uses this physical context as a way to depict an epiphanous moment, an unconscious feeling, an indescribable yet definite sense of otherworldliness, or an unlikely reaction that only takes formation in a dream.

There is also the historical event--the Nile Delta, Lisbon, a man from Benin, an African diary, history itself, and women of the nineteenth century--who populate his poetic canvas, and, frankly, appear to live outside the confines of what one would consider traditional European history. Though the people are caught up in their historical moments, they also transcend theirs; leaving us with the impression that Transtromer disagrees with the concept of contextualizing poetry. The tone of his poems is quiet to the point of deathly silence, but then again it is at these moments that we often make our greatest discoveries. There is a structure to Transtromer's events, but there is not a clearly defined structure to his poem--it is largely image driven. Then again, as we rethink history, often that is what it becomes over time: an image that becomes a part of who we are.

Finally, there is Fulton's foreword, which includes an extensive analysis of Transtromer's poetry. My suggestion is that you read this after you have finished reading his poems. As you can tell from my paltry attempt, analysis has its limits when it comes to his poetry. His poetry is not something that can be summed up or broken apart but rather must be approached in the right manner. In my humble opinion, that can only occur when you accept that he has chosen to allow you into his world of ideas. Once inside, do not take your admission for granted, for leaving it will be as challenging as entering it!

This is likely my longest review of a book that I have done on Amazon, but I think Transtromer is worthy of one. As enigmatic as my review has been (usually, I am quite the concrete-sequential thinker), I feel as if it has been the most rewarding because this is the most organic understanding I have had of the human condition save for a religious institution. If you are willing to invest the time, "the great enigma" we call life becomes less perplexing and certainly more cherished.

This collection of poetry, from the whole of Transtromer's career, more than justifies the stamp of "Nobel Prize Winner" that is printed on the cover. Shamefully, I had never heard of this Swedish born poet until the week before he won the prize. I had read an article that highlighted him as a frontrunner for the prize this year and I began to seek out his poetry. It took a bit of patience, and I urge anyone to first flip around in the book for awhile until they find the right poem that speaks to them, but once I caught the cadence of his thoughts (it was the poem A Winter Night for me), the gates opened and I was ushered into Transtromer's beautiful, and sometimes sad, vision of life. I have been bursting with nothing but praise for him ever since. His prose is very lucid and ethereal, creating a seemingly weightless reality that hovers just above and beyond our own. It called to mind a quote from the Polish author, Bruno Schulz. Schulz, in the introduction of his "The Streets Of Crocodiles", says there are images that "...are merely trying to occur, they are checking whether the ground of reality can carry them. And they quickly withdraw fearing to lose their integrity in the frailty of realization." Transtromer builds up just these sorts of images that dwell in the peripherals of existence as he speaks of death, islands, shadows, trains, memories and the absurdity of our position in life.

"I am transparent/and writing becomes visible/inside me" he writes in the poem "Further In". Much of his poetry comes from life experiences, which pass through him ("I am the turnstile" - The Outpost) and out through his pen into insightful observations on the human condition. His shorter poems often times give the reader cryptic metaphors or a simple weightless image to ponder, such as the "bridge builds itself/slowly/straight out in space" (Snow Is Falling), but it is in the longer poems where Transtromer works his real magic. In poems such as The Gallery, Night Duty or Traffic, to name a few, Transtromer weaves a variety of metaphors and images into one powerful theme. He also spends much time detailing the seasons, from lush green summers to cold, dead winters. There is a moment where he describes spring as the trees turning back to face him as he and the earth run towards each other. There is so much joy and love for the world and existence to be found within his words. In later poems, specifically poems written after his stroke, death becomes a prevalent theme as he shows us all existing within its inevitable shadow.

Give Transtromer a try. If you are patient it will really pay off and you will never view the world around you the same again. He gives us, as he puts it in a haiku:
Thoughts standing still, like
the colored mosaic stones in
the palace courtyard.

If you like poem, you must read this book.
If you dislike poem, you may be changed after reading "The Great Enigma".

As I was wandering through the internet wondering what my next read would be I came across an article about Tomas Transtromer who recently was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. With the few reviews that were posted and my genuine interest in this collection of poems translated by Fulton, I set out to purchase this book.

Transtromer's concise eloquence into the depths of the human soul has provided a window so that we can look outward from within to glance reality in a fresh hue, a rare beauty. The very depth of my soul has been deeply stirred and each poem I render alive carries me through my 'wavering' world.

Some of his poems reflect his internal struggle with the restrictions placed on his body, after his debilitating stroke, that dark place for which he wishes 'to be free' from, placing a foreboding undertone within the lines of his poems. However, what I truly love about his poems is that he is able to lift himself (us) above and beyond this dark place so that we can truthfully see our reflection in the mirror cast in the shadows of the rushing waters...not an easy task for any writer...

For those who decide to read this collection of poems by Transtromer I hope they will move you as it has for me.

It is beautifully written. I really have a good time with it. I strongly recommend people to go and get one and enjoy it.

I went through the pages of this book awed! Is it possible for a poet to write this beautifully? He reminded me of Vergil, the great poet of 2000 years ago, and suddenly I see Dante, the poet of 600 years ago! Strange! Now I see why he won noble prize. For the longest time, I was disappointed by the nobel committee for their bias, whether it was the Literature prize of the Peace prize!
For the first time, in many years I am so delighted that TOMAS won the nobel prize. I, as a poet myself, am humbled by the ingenuity of this poet. Job well done dear Tomas!

The book came as described with no damages. It was clean and in perfect condition. They sent it a few days earlier than was estimated. I would definitely buy from this seller again. The book is also just a good read. If you like the use of imagery in the hands of a master, look no further than this book or anything written by him.