The Blue House: Collected Works of Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Patty Crane. Copper Canyon Press, 2023, $40.00 cloth.
IN A HOME near the water in Sweden, there is a party with dancing. It is cold, but the dancing has made the guests warm, so much so that a window has been left open. Suddenly, “a long boat hook appears, shoved in through the open window.” Whether the guests notice the boat hook and what they might think of it are left up to the imagination. The poem is over; the boat hook hovers there, poised—for what?
The image occurs in “Preludes,” a three-part poem from Tomas Tranströmer's 1970 collection Seeing in the Dark. It's an odd, menacing image, one that Tranströmer was evidently fond of, even if its meaning was difficult for him to pin down. “The boathook is something totally foreign in this party milieu, it's something from another world, perhaps from Galilee,” he wrote in a letter to the poet Robert Bly, “it's frightening, a bit comical also, it's religious.” Reading the poem, I've always felt a diffuse sense of dread, something about the boat hook's almost mannerist extension imbuing it with a threatening aura—as though, in a sort of silent cataclysm, one were about to be hooked off-stage.
Tranströmer's poetry can often feel premonitory in just this way. In his long poem , from 1974, one of the poem's characters, a composer, suffers a cerebral hemorrhage that results in “right-side paralysis with aphasia.” The poem is terse in delineating the hemorrhage's aftermath; the composer, the line continues with imitative constraint, “can only grasp short (1996) and (2004), before his death in 2015.