The Half-Finished Heaven »

Tomas Tranströmer is the author of eleven books of poetry and a prose memoir, Memories See Me. His work has been translated into thirty languages, and has received the Petrach Prize in Germany, the Bellman Prize, the Bonnier Award for Poetry, the Swedish Academy's Nordic Prize, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

Robert Bly is a poet, essayist, cultural critic, and translator. He won the 1968 National Book Award in Poetry, and his recent books of verse include Morning Poems, Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems, and The Night Abraham Called to the Stars.

The contemporary Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer has a prestigious worldwide reputation; many expect that he will someday win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Robert Bly, a longtime friend and confidant of Tranströmer's, as well as one of his first translators, has carefully chosen and translated the finest of Tranströmer'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

Publishers Weekly

Mystical, versatile and sad, the poems (in verse and prose) of Tomas Transtromer have made him Sweden's best-known living writer. Robert Bly (Eating the Honey of Words, etc.) has long championed Transtr?mer; his latest effort in this line is The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Transtr?mer. Here are the dream and nightmare images that influenced U.S. poetry in the '60s, where "Moths settle down on the pane:/ small pale telegrams from the world." Here, too, are the brief, haunting works of more recent years: "I am carried inside/ my own shadow like a violin/ in its black case." (Nov.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.