The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Transtromer (Paperback)

Description

---

From the Winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature

The contemporary Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer is a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature and has a prestigious worldwide reputation. Robert Bly, a longtime friend and confidant of Transtromer's, as well as one of his first translators, has carefully chosen and translated the finest of Transtromer'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

About the Author

---

Tomas Transtromer (1933-2015) received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011. His books of poetry, which have been translated into sixty languages, include "The Deleted World" and "The Half-Finished Heaven," and he received numerous international honors during his lifetime. Transtromer, a trained Swedish psychologist, worked for years in state institutions with juveniles and the disabled, and his work was often praised for the inventive ways in which it examined the mind. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy stated that "through his condensed, translucent images, he gave us fresh access to reality."

Praise For…

---

"The poems of Tomas Tranströmer are points of entry 'upward into / the depths' of an imagination, a spirit that is regeneratively inventive, capacious, unillusioned, undaunted, admirable . . . This extraordinary collection of work by one of Sweden's greatest contemporary poets presents a rich sampling of verse published during the past five decades."—The New York Times Book Review