The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems by Tomas Tranströmer, trans. Robin FultonNew Directions, 2006

These are poems to read and re-read, full of beautiful images. I like how Tranströmer writes about space, about place, whether that space is a forest or an island or the middle of Stockholm. There is so much light in these poems, and beauty, and joy and music, poems about Haydn and Schubert, poems with lines like “within us, balanced like a gyroscope, is joy.” I love the imagery: light as a horse, pulling “the green sledge of late spring” in “The Four Temperaments,” or these lines from “Answers to Letters”: “Time is not a straight line, it’s more of a labyrinth, and if you press close to the wall at the right place you can hear the hurrying steps and the voices, you can hear yourself walking past on the other side.” The idea of time as a labyrinth could be so trite, but that image that follows makes it more than a cliché: the labyrinth is suddenly solid: you stop and imagine it; it makes you pause where you might otherwise skim past. I like how these poems embrace so much: the epiphany of a poem called “Romanesque Arches,” the move from the frustration of the first lines, with “jostl[ing]” tourists in a church where “vault gape[s] behind vault, no complete view,” to the idea that “inside you vault opens behind vault endlessly./You will never be complete, that’s how it’s meant to be,” to the acceptance of the last lines: “I was pushed out on the sun-seething piazza/together with Mr. and Mrs. Jones, Mr. Tanaka, and Signora Sabatini/and inside each of them vault opened behind vault endlessly.”