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 \u201cthe green sledge of late spring\u201d in \u201cThe Four Temperaments,\u201d or these lines from \u201cAnswers to Letters\u201d: \u201cTime is not a straight line, it\u2019s 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.\u201d 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 \u201cRomanesque Arches,\u201d the move from the frustration of the first lines, with \u201cjostl[ing]\u201d tourists in a church where \u201cvault gape[s] behind vault, no complete view,\u201d to the idea that \u201cinside you vault opens behind vault endlessly.\/You will never be complete, that\u2019s how it\u2019s meant to be,\u201d to the acceptance of the last lines: \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}