Daily Glance: The Star By My Head

Morling's and Ellerstrom's The Star By My Head: Poets from Sweden is an anthology of eight Swedish poets.  It contains a brief helpful introduction and a "Brief History of Modern Swedish Poetry" as an afterword.  As I know little about Swedish poetry, I found the collection fascinating but not overwhelming.  My biggest complaint is that I wish it were longer and included more poets.  Besides Transtromer, it was the female poets who really jumped out to me, like Sodergran, Forsstrom, and Lugn.  Sodergran's poetry is full of great lines: "my garden is full of shards," "Every poem shall be the tearing up of a poem / not a poem, but claw marks. "  Lugn's poetry plays quite a bit with gender issues, but it is based on a poetics of clarity (so no heavy duty lit theory is needed to get it).  There's a subtle sarcasm to it that I like.  Ultimately this collection, like any good anthology, leaves me with the desire to read more work by the poets and to search for the poets that surround them geographically and literarily.

As I don't speak Swedish, I cannot speak to the over quality of the translation, but I can say that I found the English version of Transtromer's "Allegro" to be excellent.  It's one of those poems that alone could give a poet a place on the shelf.