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Cover of The Blue House: Collected Works of Tomas Tranströmer

The Blue House: Collected Works of Tomas Tranströmer

by Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Patty Crane

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Nobel Prize-winner Tomas Tranströmer explores the personal and political, the ecological and existential, through poems that expand like the widening scope of a telephoto lens. With slow strokes and subtle, rich lines, The Blue House: Collected Works of Tomas Tranströmer is evidence of a Nobel Prize-winning poet tracing the world with his pen. A stunning testament to an illustrious career, The Blue House gathers poems and writings from Tranströmer's fourteen collections into a single book. Original Swedish sits alongside their English translations as Patty Crane translates his words into revelatory language acute in the understanding of human change and loss. Subtle in politics and exact in imagery, the poems of The Blue House range from agile haiku to cinematic prose.…

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"A poem by Swedish Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer is one in which “consciousness can take hold of the world/ like a hand clutching a sun-warmed stone.” Tranströmer’s grasp is gentle, but startling surprises surface from the depths in his hand. This book is the culmination of a years-long endeavor by Patty Crane to render all of Tranströmer’s work in an English as subtle and sensitive as the poet’s original Swedish, in which “The shadows here are deep/ without a voice.” There are many versions of this titanic poet in English, but this one should become the standard – Crane’s translation is the Tranströmer to read."
NPR Books We Love — 2023 · apps.npr.org