Nordic Book Club, September

Free for Swenson Center members and Augie students/$10 nonmember

September’s book is The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems by Tomas Transtromer, translated by Robin Fulton, 2006.

In day's first hours consciousness can grasp the world

as the hand grips a sun-warmed stone.

Translated into fifty languages, the poetry of Tomas Transtromer has had a profound influence around the world, an influence that has steadily grown and has now attained a prominence comparable to that of Pablo Neruda's during his lifetime. But if Neruda is blazing fire, Transtromer is expanding ice. The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems gathers all the poems Tomas Transtromer has published, from his distinctive first collection in 1954, 17 Poems, through his epic poem Baltics (my most consistent attempt to write music), and The Sad Gondola, published six years after he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1990 (I am carried in my shadow / like a violin…