News that the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature had been awarded to the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer was greeted with widespread approval by poets and poetry readers the world over. The author of fifteen collections of poems, Transtromer had in fact been nominated for the prize every year since 1993, a sign of his huge standing and importance in world poetry, undiminished in recent years despite a stroke in 1990 that left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak. The Nobel citation praised Transtromer's poems of "condensed, translucent images" which give us "fresh access to reality," and that startling originality is everywhere to be seen in the poems gathered here, first published as two separate volumes by the Dedalus Press, The Wild Marketplace (1985) and For the Living and the Dead (1994), both translated by John F. Deane, the latter in collaboration with the poet himself.

Tomas Transtroemer (1931-2015) was Sweden's most important poet of the past fifty years. This book contains all the poems he published, including those from the Bloodaxe Collected Poems of 1987, as well as three later collections, For Living and Dead (1989), The Sad Gondola (1996) and The Great Enigma (2004), and a prose memoir. A further revised edition was published in 2011. In Sweden he has been called a 'buzzard poet' because his haunting, visionary poetry shows the world from a height, in a mystic dimension, but brings every detail of the natural world into sharp focus. His poems are often explorations of the borderland between sleep and waking, between the conscious and unconscious states. Transtroeomer was born in Stockholm, where he grew up, but spent many long summers on the island of Runmaroe in the nearby archipelago, evoking that landscape in his early work, which draws on the aesthetic tradition of Swedish nature poetry. His later poetry is more personal, open and relaxed, often reflecting his broad interests: travel, music, painting, archaeology and natural sciences. Many of his poems use compressed description and concentrate on a single distinct image as a catalyst for psychological insight and metaphysical interpretation. This acts as a meeting-point or threshold between conflicting elements or forces: sea and land, man and nature, freedom and control. Robin Fulton worked with Tomas Transtroemer on each of his collections as they were published over many years, which involved detailed exchanges between translator and poet on the meaning and music of numerous poems. There have been several translations as well as some books of so-called "versions" of Transtromer's poetry published in English, but Fulton's is the most authoritative and comprehensive edition of his poetry published anywhere.

One day in spring 1964, the young American poet Robert Bly left his rural farmhouse and drove 150 miles to the University of Minnesota library in Minneapolis to obtain the latest book by the young Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer. When Bly returned home that evening with a copy of Transtromer's The Half-Finished Heaven, he found a letter waiting for him from its author. With this remarkable coincidence as its beginning, what followed was a vibrant correspondence between two poets who would become essential contributors to global literature. Airmail collects more than 290 letters, written from 1964 until 1990, when Transtromer suffered a stroke that has left him partially paralysed and diminished his capacity to write. Across their correspondence, the two poets are profoundly engaged with each other and with the larger world: the Vietnam War, European and American elections, and the struggles of affording a life as a writer. Airmail also offers remarkable insights into the processes of translating literature from one language into another. As Bly began to render Transtromer's poetry into English and Transtromer began to translate Bly's poetry into Swedish, their collaboration soon turned into a friendship that has lasted fifty years. Insightful, brilliant, and often funny, Airmail provides a rare portrait of two artists who have become integral to each other's particular genius. Based on the original Swedish edition published in 2001, this publication marks the first time letters by Transtromer and Bly have been made available in Britain. Robert Bly's translations of Tomas Transtromer appear in The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Transtromer, published by Graywolf Press. Transtromer's complete poetry is available in English in Robin Fulton's translation, New Collected Poems, published by Bloodaxe Books (and by New Directions in the US under the title The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems).

Tomas Transtromer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 2011. He was then the first Swedish writer to become a laureate for almost forty years. This anthology takes an intercontinental perspective on the poetry of Transtromer. It raises the question of how his poetry is actually perceived in continents predominated by other literary preferences. It also gives insight to the literal appearance of his poetry in essentially different languages. Transtromer International features a seminar of world poets, placing his poetry in context by relating to their countries of origin: Columbia, Iran and Bangladesh. Angela Garcia, Azita Ghahreman, Anisur Rahman and Kristian Carlsson-i.e. the main seminar committee-also present one poem each inspired by Transtromer. And a select working group has translated sample poems of Transtromer into several world languages, printed alongside the Swedish originals. Most translations are done exclusively for this anthology, and in addition to some new English versions, there are poems in Arabic, Bengali, Farsi, Japanese, Romani, Russian, North Sami, Somali and Spanish.

Tomas Transtromer's poems are thick with the feel of life lived in a specific place: the dark, overpowering Swedish winters, the long thaws and brief paradisal summers in the Stockholm archipelago. He conveys a sense of what it is like to be a private citizen in the second half of the twentieth century.

An International Poetry Forum Selection, translated from the Swedish by May Swenson with Leif Sjoeberg. Tomas Transtroemer 2011 Nobel Laureate in Literature "Tomas Transtroemer, who is today one of Sweden's most distinguished poets . . . can compare Lake Malar at dawn with a blue lamp, the islands creeping over the grass like nocturnal butterflies."-New York Times