Jared Marcel Pollen at Poetry Magazine:
Tranströmer has been praised for the apparent effortlessness of his craft. The poet and critic David Orr writes, “The typical Tranströmer poem is an exercise in sophisticated simplicity, in which relatively spare language acquires remarkable depth, and every word seems measured to the millimeter.” I think of his poetry as being like a Kagan couch, its upholstery fixed with a single staple, or a Newtonian bridge that needs no nails and is held together by the elegance of its stress equations. It is free of any superfluous furniture—“Truth doesn’t need any furniture,” Tranströmer writes in “Preludes.”
But this risks making Tranströmer sound like a Swedish minimalist. Far from it: the poems gathered in this collection—spanning 50 years—are remarkably varied, incorporating prose poems, long lines, and haiku. They move easily from the idyll to the suburb, the cloudscape to the metro station, the nave to the waiting room, yet all bear what his friend Robert Bly—whose early translations were partly responsible for introducing Tranströmer’s work to English readers in the 1970s—described as his “strange genius for the image” and a “mystery and surprise [that] never fade, even on many readings.”
more here.