Selected Poems

I'm gradually overcome with the realization that Tomas Transtromer's body and the world's body are one pulsing, glimmering conversation. He says, "I'm not empty, I'm open." It's through his vulnerable, participatory wandering that Transtromer finds lucidity. Transtromer is always looking for the hub, the center, the reference point in life. He tells us that we live as people of multiplicity, anonymous and uncertain. As Protean men and women, we find no solid identities. "Proteus...can't write his own name. He draws back from that terrified, as the wolf from the silver bullet." The Protean human, attempting to establish meaning without being tied down, experiences at once an invasive reality and a distressing invisibility. Transtromer expresses this bittersweetly: "I who love to stray off and vanish in the crowd, a capital T in the mass of endless text." In these essentially lonely poems, Transtromer tells the story of a crowd of people sitting in a stalled train, staring out the windows pointlessly,until a train-man strikes just the right wheel with his hammer. Immediately, "the ringing swells incomprehensibly: a thunderclap,/ a cathedral-bells-sound, a world-circumnavigating sound,/ that lifts the whole train...Everyone is singing!" All it takes is stopping long enough to listen with reverence in order to "Proceed!" like the liberated train. Transtromer is not always suffering from invisibility or assaulted by the "murmuring masses." One day, walking, he finds that "The street's massive life whirls around me;/ it remembers and desires nothing...It seems to me that the street can see me...for a second I am lit. It sees me." Transtromer's life, and the readers' lives, may be "impregnated with four times joy and three times sorrow", but "By stealth we milked the cosmos and survived." There is, ultimately, a great sensuous and religious music to Transtromer's poetry that seeps into the reader's soul like a deep and long cello note, lifted on a light wind