The Blue House

August 1, 2023
This volume of the collected works of Swedish poet and Nobel Laureate Transt�mer is incandescent. Crane's translations feel as close to the original Swedish as one is likely to get. As she said in a 2016 interview when her first Transt�mer translation, Bright Scythe, was published, "I often felt that he was speaking to me . . . his way of looking compelled me." This new gathering will draw readers into the poet's grounded realm of both the familiar and the magical. In the title poem, "The Blue House," he describes a garden gone to seed: "pagodas of weeds, upwelling text, Upanishads of weeds, a Viking flotilla of weeds." Life and death and all that matters surface in plain speech throughout these vital, at times, ethereal poems. As Yusef Komunyakaa writes in his attentive introduction, "Confronting and communing with the elements . . . the natural world dovetails with the human psyche." The 14 books collected here include Transtr�mer's melodically compact memoir, Memories Watch Me, a delightful glimpse into the earthy formation of this poet's young life. The Blue House will long be considered the definitive tome of Transtr�mer's work in English and should be on every poetry shelf.

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November 20, 2023
This posthumous collection by the Swedish Nobel laureate, who died in 2015, is a definitive gathering of his meditative wisdom, refreshing visionary lyrics, and rich landscape portraits, opening on his 1954 debut 17 Poems and ending with 2004’s The Great Enigma. Skillfully rendered in Crane’s translations, these frequently restrained poems are studded with unforgettable phrases, weaving music, mythology, and the personal like “small pale telegrams from the world.” Readers witness the evolution of Tranströmer’s mind and craft, as well as his obsession with the natural world: “The land and I sprang toward each other” (“Face to Face”). His is an inviting, quieting voice on the page that asks, “Are you coming along to my childhood?” (“Midday Thaw”). The reader is left feeling the weight of witness through Tranströmer’s sensory powers, which the poet wields for inspection: “We secretly milked the cosmos and survived.” This is a revelatory gathering from one of 20th-century poetry’s most enduring presences.