Tomas Transtromer won the Nobel Prize in 2011, but like most authors in translation, it always takes some time for the collected works to trickle into our American bookstores and onto our shelves. I may still be a little late to the parade, shouting praise of Transtromer’s The Great Enigma, but I think he’s worthy of the attention.

Tomas Transtromer is the Swedish Robert Frost. The staccato images of his poems pull you into the woods, into a natural world in which truth is just below the ice on the frozen pond.

Transtromer made a name for himself as a poet in Sweden in the 1970s and 80s, having published several small, but well received, collections. In 1990, he suffered  a stroke that damaged his right hand, and made his speech difficult to understand. 6 years later, he published The Sad Gondola.

“From July 1990”

It was a funeral
and I felt the dead man
was reading my thoughts
better than I could.

The organ was silent, the birds sang.
The grave out in the sunshine.
My friend’s voice belonged
on the far side of the minutes.

I drove home seen through
by the glitter of the summer day
by rain and quietness
seen through by the moon.

Airmail, released this month by Graywolf Press, is the collected letters of the American poet, Robert Bly, and Tomas Transtromer. The book is an intimate portrait of the two men, as well as an opportunity to eavesdrop on their conversations on poetry, art, life, and the art of translation. The wisdom these men share! (and the cartoon drawings are pretty great, too)

original text of Air Mail

“Air Mail”

On the hunt for a mailbox
I took the letter through the city.
In the big forest of stone and concrete
the straying butterfly flickered.

The flying-carpet of the stamp
the staggering lines of the address
plus my own sealed truth
soaring now over the ocean.

The Atlantic’s creeping silver.
The cloud banks. The fishing boat
like a spat-out olive-stone.
And the pale scars of the wakes.

Down here work goes slowly.
I ogle the clock often.
The tree-shadows are black ciphers
in the greedy silence.

The truth’s there, on the ground
but no one dares to take it.
The truth’s there, on the street.
No one makes it his own.

And if you like this poetry, you will like this music by Edward Elgar (The Enigma Variations)

Reading Sharon Olds’ work, you are reading the poet’s own life history–the messiness of life rubbing up against the beautiful. Sharon Olds is not afraid to air her dirty laundry in public. In Stag’s Leap, she isn’t afraid to air her ex-husband’s dirty laundry, either.

Over the course of her writing career, Olds has hashed and rehashed her experiences–the death of her college sweetheart, the birth of her two children, her marriage, the death of her father and then mother. Stag’s Leap, Olds’ newest collection of poetry (and the Pulitzer Prize winner for 2013) is no exception; the book chronicles her divorce with a blatant honesty that is unsentimental and refreshing. (The severed marriage is especially poignant when juxtaposed to the intimate portrayls of her ex-husband in her previous books of poetry.)

The poems are arranged chronologically, moving from the first moments of separation(“While he told me, I looked from small thing/to small thing”), to years after (“We talk of the kids, and it’s/ as if that will never be taken from us”). She charts the change in emotion and relationship: the shock of being a single again, the feelings of inadequacy, anger, bitterness, guilt, and eventually, forgiveness.

Stag’s Leap is a poignant portrait of life-after-marriage. The not-so-glamourous story of falling out of love.

I had never read Sylvia Plath’s poetry before this week, and I was surprised, when compared to The Bell Jar, which is written in straightforward prose, by the complexity of her poetry. Like T.S. Eliot, who relies on a musicality and sound of the line, Plath writes poetry that is full of sound. Her images are quick, often formed in only a couple well-chosen words, and are rapidly arrived at in her work.

We are all familiar with Sylvia’s dramatic life (and death): the American girl with an ear and eye for poetry, her marriage to the British poet, Ted Hughes, her failure to maintain sanity, and her eventual suicide in her kitchen.

Sylvia Plath’s paints her lines with images like a surrealist (think Dali–melting clocks beside a Greco-Roman arch, a piece of meat decaying in the foreground while a kite flies overhead). She makes broad leaps from calm and gentle images—a tree—to violent ones—mottled and bloody necks—and back again. Unlike Charles Simic, for instance, who relies on the narrative power of the images, Plath uses the symbolic meaning of the image to unite her poem.

The yew’s black fingers wag;

Cold clouds go over.

So the deaf and dumb

Signal the blind, and are ignored.

 

I like black statements.

The featurelessness of that cloud, now!

White as an eye all over!

The eye of the blind pianist

 

At my table on the ship.

He felt for his food.

His fingers had the noses of weasels.

I couldn’t stop looking.

 

He could hear Beethoven:

Black yew, white cloud,

The horrific complications.

Finger-traps—a tumult of keys.

 

Empty and silly as plates,

So the blind smile.

I envy the big noises,

The yew hedge of the Gross Fugue.

 

Deafness is something else.

Such a dark funnel, my father!

I see your voice

Black and leafy, as in my childhood,

 

A yew hedge of orders,

Gothic and barbarous, pure German.

Dead men cry from it.

I am guilty of nothing.

 

The yew my Christ, then.

Is it not as tortured?

And you, during the Great War

In the California delicatessen

 

Lopping the sausages!

They color my sleep,

Red, mottled, like cut necks.

There was a silence!

 

Great silence of another order.

I was seven, I knew nothing.

The world occurred.

You had one leg, and a Prussian mind.

 

Now similar clouds

Are spreading their vacuous sheets.

I am lame in the memory.

 

I remember a blue eye,

A briefcase of tangerines.

This was a man, then!

Death opened, like a black tree, blackly.

 

I survive the while,

Arranging my morning.

These are my fingers, this my baby.

The clouds are a marriage dress, of that pallor.

Sylvia Plath opened the gateway for confessional poetry, yet she buries the personal implications of her writing deep in the text. This veiling enables her work to be overtly smart. The poem is more than just a personal confession, it is also a complex exploration into the pregnant power of symbols to convey meaning.

Last Sunday the NYTimes had a three page article about the dating scene in China. The article was a fascinating discussion of love in a modern age: if China is our future, it is a very love-lost place. Marriage is a commodity bought and sold. Alongside the wealthy paying for an agency to find their spouse, the working poor set up booths in parks advertising their viability as a spouse. If you happen to be an educated woman or a man without a Beijing apartment, your chances of marital bliss are slim.

Rereading Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnets, I was struck by the dichotomy of the two.

Millay brought the sonnet into the modern age with her sharp wit, but with the decline in “romantic” love, will her sonnets still be true in another 100 years? I would like to think yes, that alongside all of our social media relationships (are those even real?) we will be able to maintain some semblance of romantic love. We still have time to fall in love (the classic meet-cute) and out of it as well.

I think Millay was probably asking herself the same question. The 1920s-40s were a time of cultural change not unlike our own: the economic downturn of the Great Depression, the swelling growth of cities, the technological advancements that rapidly change the job market, the revolutions occurring across the globe (a democracy or republic is no longer the only accepted forms of government). Millay, the daughter of a single mother, fled to New York City where she fought to maintain her independence–love without marriage, marriage without sacrificing her career. Can a woman really have it all?

If I should learn, in some quite casual way,

That you were gone, not to return again–

Read form the back-page of a paper,say,

Held by a neighbor in a subway train,

How at the corner of this avenue

And such a street (so are the papers filled)

A hurrying man, who happened to be you,

At noon today had happened to be killed–

I should not cry aloud-I could not cry

Aloud, or wring my hands in such a place–

I should but watch the station lights rush by

With a more careful interest on my face;

Or raise my eyes and read with greater care

Where to store furs and how to treat the hair.

If you want to read more of Millay, her Collected Poems are arranged by type and chronology–sonnets in the back, lyrical poets in the front.

At first glance, Carson’s books look like a lot of work. Most of them have their roots in classical Greek or Latin literature, aren’t formatted like anything you’ve ever seen before, and seem so bizarre you aren’t sure which way is up. In this instance, first impressions are deceiving (kind of).

Autobiography of Red

This novel in verse originates from the fragmented poetry of Stesichoros. (What, you haven’t heard of him?) Stesichoros had the unfortunate problem of coming “after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet;” much of his poetry has been lost over time, as well as classical scholar’s knowledge of his life.

Anne Carson begins with the little remains of his work we have left to create a modern day epic of Greek proportions. The novel reads part Beckett play, part Greek tragedy, & part contemporary poetry. The work is timeless, or rather, it is literature that transcends time and place. Although it is set in the present day, the struggles of a Greek hero are just as relevant to our modern day life as they were over 2000 years ago.

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The sequel to Autobiography of  (& did I mention it came out THIS WEEK!) Except the characters have new names and the verse looks different on the page (instead of sprawling lines, they are close-knit like columns). Anne Carson’s style forces us to question what is essential in the story. Does it matter if the names of the characters change? The genders? The setting? Isn’t the story just as applicable? Can it be just as true?

Nox

I’m going to be honest here, I’m a sucker for books that come in boxes. After her brother died, Anne Carson compiled a notebook to grieve the loss. The result is Nox.  Her notebook has been reproduced in an accordian-folded scroll, contained in the box. The book is a work of art. Diving through cultural layers, Anne Carson produces a portrait of grief and family.

Antigonick

A retelling of Sophocles’ Antigone. (Anne Carson translated, Bianca Stone illustrated). Antigonick is beautiful–Bianca’s drawings are printed on semi-transparent paper, bound intermittenly. The verse is arranged like a free-form poem and spreads across the page. The book follows the story of Antigone pretty closely, though it does vere off course every once and awhile (I doubt Kreon discussed Hegel in the original), but the modernization of the text only adds to the depth of the story.