Extract

Despondency breaks off its course. Anguish breaks off its course. The vulture breaks off its flight.

A piano chord strikes in an empty room, and the walls remember it long after the hand has lifted. Tomas Tranströmer's 1962 collection established the luminous, compressed style that would make him one of the great poets of the twentieth century: images drawn from the Swedish landscape, from dreams, from the borderlands between waking and sleep, distilled into lines of uncanny precision. Each poem is a small clearing in a vast forest, a moment where the visible world opens onto something numinous. Tranströmer worked as a psychologist, and his poems carry that attentiveness to the threshold between conscious and unconscious life. The title says everything: heaven is half-finished, and the poem is one of its unfinished rooms.