By KEN WORPOLE [Independent] – [Nobelist Tomas] Transtromer’s subjects often feel that they have woken from the dream of life. The constant inversion of dream time and reality, of night and day, of the horizontal and vertical worlds, are abiding themes for this writer, a psychologist by profession who has worked principally with those deemed to be outcasts from society.
The poems also exhibit a photographic imagination in which light and dark are often transposed, as in the beautiful opening image of “The Couple”:
They turn out the lamplight, and its white globe
glimmers for a moment: an aspirin rising and falling
then dissolving in a glass of darkness.
The “deleted world” is what happens when the lights go off, whether in the bedroom, or in the forest when the night bus stalls in the snow and the visual world shuts down. The brittleness of the Swedish winter means that fractures appear in the spiritual world, too, opening up “a crack/ where the dead/ are smuggled over the border”. A consciousness of political borders separates the writer from old friends behind the Iron Curtain: “We will meet in two hundred years/ when the microphones on the hotel walls are forgotten.”
Though frail, and without the use of his right arm, Transtromer delighted the South Bank audience with two small pieces of piano music, played with the left hand, reminding many that he is also a fine poet on the subject of music and musicality…
Continued at The Independent |
… and coming to earth out of the void.
By TOM SLEIGH [Poets.org] – My first glimpse of Tomas Tranströmer was many years ago in Provincetown, Massachusetts as he ducked his head under the metal lip of a twelve-seater plane’s exit door, then stepped hesitantly down the stairs to firm ground. He seemed a little shaken, his long face blanched, his features reminding me, when I think of it now, of the circus horse in a late Bonnard painting: gentle, wary, potentially sad. “I don’t mind large planes or middle-sized planes (his English was slightly gutteral, his intonations lilting in a mild brogue), but small planes—you feel too much of the air under you.” That remark, direct, plainspoken, but also flirting with the metaphysical, has seemed over the years a keyhole into his work: a void; a sense of hovering above that void; the nerves registering each tremor with precision; the mind fighting back the body’s accelerating fear.
The reception of his poems thirty years ago is now part of American literary history: serviceably and widely translated from the Swedish, they were talked about by many of his English-speaking admirers in terms of “deep image.”
Continued at Poets.org | http://tomastranstromer.net/ (Lion Publishing) | More Chronicle & Notices.
