Home > Work > The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems
1 " I wrote so meagerly to you. But what I couldn't write swelled and swelled like an old-fashioned airship and drifted away at last through the night sky. "
― Tomas Tranströmer , The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems
2 " Every abstract picture of the world is as impossible as a blueprint of a storm, "
3 " I must be alone ten minutes in the morning and ten minutes in the evening. – Without a programme. "
4 " But every person has their own encyclopedia written, which grows out from each soul, composed from birth onward, hundreds of thousands of pages pressing into each other and yet there’s air between them! Like trembling leaves in a forest. A book of contradictions. What’s in there is revised by the moment; the images touch themselves up, the words flicker. A wave washes through the entire text, followed by the next wave, and the next . . . "
5 " Espresso The black coffee they serve out of doors among tables and chairs gaudy as insects. Precious distillations filled with the same strength as Yes and No. It’s carried out from the gloomy kitchen and looks into the sun without blinking. In the daylight a dot of beneficent black that quickly flows into a pale customer. It’s like the drops of black profoundness sometimes gathered up by the soul, giving a salutary push: Go! Inspiration to open your eyes. "
6 " This woman keeps buying things to toss in the hungry mouth of the vacuum sneaking up behind her. "
7 " Weary of all who come with words, words but no language,I make my way to the snow-covered island.The untamed has no words.The unwritten pages spread out on every side!I come upon the tracks of deer in the snow.Language but no words. "
8 " There is Peace in the Surging Prow"On a winter morning you feel how this earthplunges ahead. Against the house wallsan air current smacksout of hiding.Surrounded by movement: the tent of calm.And the secret helm in the migrating flock.Out of the winter glooma tremolo risesfrom hidden instruments. It is like standingunder summer’s high lime tree with the dinof ten thousandinsect wings above your head. "
9 " And the shadow gathers and becomes a tidal wave a tidal wave with riding sea gulls darkened. And the port-side heart sizzles in a breaker. Death and renewal when the wave arrives. The gathering of white birds grew: gulls dressed in canvas from the sails of foundered ships but stained by vapors from forbidden shores. The herring gull: a harpoon with a velvet back. In closeup like a snowed-in hull with hidden pulses glittering in rhythm. His flier’s nerves in balance. He soars. Footless hanging in the wind he dreams his hunter’s dream with his beak’s sharp shot. "