The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems

The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems

<p><strong>The collected poems of one of the world's greatest living writers, Tomas Transtromer, available in this comprehensive edition.</strong></p><br /><br /><em>In day's first hours consciousness can grasp the world<br /> as the hand grips a sun-warmed stone.</em><br /><br /> Translated into fifty languages, the poetry of Tomas Transtromer has had a profound influence around the world, an influence that has steadily grown and has now attained a prominence comparable to that of Pablo Neruda's during his lifetime. But if Neruda is blazing fire, Transtromer is expanding ice. <em>The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems</em> gathers all the poems Tomas Transtromer has published, from his distinctive first collection in 1954, <em>17 Poems</em>, through his epic poem <em>Baltics</em> ("my most consistent attempt to write music"), and <em>The Sad Gondola</em>, published six years after he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1990 ("I am carried in my shadow / like a violin / in its black case."), to his most recent slim book, <em>The Great Enigma</em>, published in Sweden in 2004. Also included is his prose-memoir <em>Memories Look at Me</em>, containing keys into his intensely spiritual, metaphysical poetry (like the brief passage of insect collecting on Runmaro Island when he was a teenager). Firmly rooted in the natural world, his work falls between dream and dream; it probes "the great unsolved love" with the opening up, through subtle modulations, of "concrete words."