Tomas Tranströmer — Sweden's eighth Literature Laureate, but the first since 1974. Photo: Ulla Montan

As a people, Swedes are unusually keen on poetry. We have a powerful relationship with our old poets through songs, ballads and hymns, and new poetry is regularly reviewed in the arts pages of newspapers.

When the Swedish Academy awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature to Tomas Tranströmer, therefore, it was little wonder that people cheered all over Sweden. Not just professional literary experts. In one of the Swedish daily papers, soccer player Henrik Rydström, a midfielder with top Swedish team Kalmar, wrote that Tranströmer almost always manages to evoke such clear and natural poetic images that you immediately think, “That’s it, exactly!”

Okay. Let’s not exaggerate the Swedes’ love of poetry. It is and always will be a fairly exclusive art form. But for anyone interested in starting to read poetry, Tomas Tranströmer is an unusually generous and welcoming bard.

Here is why you should read Tranströmer:

1. Swedish nature

In Tomas Tranströmer’s work, the Swedish countryside is a natural forum. Here we find the lakes, the rivers, the forests, the Swedish archipelago. As a poet, he moves unusually quietly and attentively through the landscape and follows the changing seasons and the shifts in the weather. Few Swedish poets have captured the balm of the brief, intensive Nordic spring with such delightful precision.

2. The sun

The sun is often visible in Tranströmer’s poetry. Darkness and night may seem more common, but if you look carefully the yellow sun is shining there over people’s lives. His sun is warm and benevolent, but sometimes frightening as well; it burns, glows and shines. "I don’t write about God, I write about the sun", Tranströmer once said.

Swedish nature — central to Tranströmer´s poetry. Photo: Per-Erik Tell/imagebank.sweden.se  

3. The dreams

Most of us would claim to undergo our most memorable experiences while awake. Tranströmer would not agree. For him, what goes on in the world of dreams is at least as rich and important. As early as 1954, he began his first book with the now-legendary Tranströmer line: "Waking up is a parachute jump from dreams". He turns matters upside down so that we jump from the dream, which seems a superior place, down into waking life! Over the years, he weaves his experience of dreams into all his collections of poems.

4. The Swedish Model

Tomas Tranströmer’s work coincides in time with the Swedish welfare model. Many are the poems in which he travels by car through the lonely villages and brightly lit towns of the Swedish landscape. On these travels, he also passes institutions and government agencies that he finds rigid and hostile to life. Tranströmer delivers his testimony from the years just prior to the privatization of Swedish society, for better or worse.

5. The world

His poetry gives a powerful sense of what it feels like to contemplate the world from a small country in Northern Europe, especially during the Cold War. In the 1960s and 1970s, relations with the Soviet Union were a sensitive matter, in both the political arena and the literary. Tomas Tranströmer was one of the few poets who wrote about the people kept under surveillance and wiretapped in our neighboring countries across the Baltic.

6. Close perception 

In his small book of prose, The Memories See Me (1993), Tomas Tranströmer describes how at the age of five or six he was separated from his mother in the crowds at a downtown Stockholm square, Hötorget. Frightened and worried, the boy sets off alone on the long walk to the part of town where he lives. He passes house-fronts, street crossings, grown-ups. The heightened perception this experience gave him seems reflected throughout his work as a poet.

7. The music

"After a black day/I play Haydn and feel a little warmth in my hands", he writes in his poem "Allegro". Music is everywhere in his writing. He listens to Schubert, Grieg and Liszt, and draws on music for poem titles. Throughout Tranströmer’s poetry, music is a parallel language, more merciful than words.

8. Visions

In the most commonplace situations, Tranströmer’s poetic ego may suddenly have a vision, an epiphany. In mid-step whilst wandering down a mundane city street, he experiences a wonderful sense of existential meaning and ambience. Such revelations have become one of the most distinctive features of his poetry. And he evokes the same sense of wonder in the reader.

9. Death

In Tranströmer’s work, death is often stealthy and unpleasant. We human beings live out our lives while death bides its time. As in the poem "Black Postcard", where he writes: "In the middle of life, death comes/ to take your measurements. The visit/ is forgotten and life goes on. But the suit/ is being sewn on the sly".

10. The Nobel Prize

Tomas Tranströmer has been translated into 60 languages. It is no secret that previous Nobel laureates, such as the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, the St. Lucian Derek Walcott and the Russian-American Joseph Brodsky have all argued that he should be given the award. All have testified to the power and inspiration of his poetry. Tomas Tranströmer may have been born in the small country of Sweden but he is a great poet on the world stage.

Åsa Beckman

Åsa Beckman is Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter's chief literary critic. She admits to becoming a Tranströmer fan quite late in life: "As a young critic, I was suspicious of his perfection. I have matured since!"

The author alone is responsible for the opinions expressed in this article.

Translation: Stephen Croall