Baltics

Book excerpt: "Tomas Transtromer published his groundbreaking collection Baltics (Ostersjoar) in 1974. In this book-length poem, Transtromer creates a literal and figurative landscape where his family history becomes the psychological, perhaps even the spiritual, history of the poet himself. Time, geography, a family, an island, a country, the labor of seamanship these elements, and so many more, show a voice whose multiplicities and conjunctions intertwine to resemble something like the layers of a symphony, a symphony of narrative, of the minimal, the liminal, the image, collisions, and fragments. Baltics, as its plural name suggests, is an experiment in the conflation of time, a theme that has come to define Transtromer s career as a poet. Out of print for nearly 40 years, this new edition contains a revised translation by Samuel Charters, a new afterword and translator s note, an 80-page photo essay by Ann Charters, and the original Swedish text en face"--back cover.