Poet, novelist, and philosopher Lars Gustafsson (1936-2016) was one of Europe's leading literary figures. Much of his writing is concerned with the search for moral consciousness and the relationship between personal experience and self-awareness, imbued with a philosophically founded scepticism toward language. His poetry is renowned for relating the metaphysical to the mundane with a particular clarity and precision, illuminating the potency of ordinary objects and everyday events as he addresses critical issues that have concerned great thinkers over the centuries. His first book of poetry to be published in Britain has an introduction by Per Wastberg. Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation, shortlisted for the Bernard Shaw Prize 2018 (for translation from Swedish).

Poetry. Translated from the Swedish by Hildred Crill. Per Wastberg's poems move through landscape and memory recreating neighborhoods, houses and docks in sharp detail while at the same time contemplating invisible forces: Time's bones are brittleand the cold bath house in a deplorable state.Insurance for longhorn beetle not paid.The cuckoo calls from a large saucepan.Under a thinned sky we dipinto sweetness of overripe fruit.The self-analytical shadows passover the spirit level's blind eye.The poems track the interior of the self as well as imagined lives of others through time, through childhood, youth, love and death. Yet they give no easy determination of place, no simplistic discovery of direction. Even the process of dying is closely and slowly observed in advance, both the physicality ("Like when you let go of a load of wood and pull off an icy glove") and the ineffable ("But the alphabet still glows, like asteroids over the expanses of snow"). COMPASS BEARING presents twenty of Wastberg's poems in translation selected from his 2004 collection, Tillbaka i tid (Back in Time), poems that span more than five decades.