Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer (1931–2015) is one of Sweden’s most important writers. He is also one of the most influential figures in contemporary world literature. His career spanned fifty years, and thirteen collections of poetry, which include 170 poems. His poems have been translated into more than 60 languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Persian and Malayalam. Among the array of awards that he has received are the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (1990), the Swedish Academy Nordic Prize (1991), the Griffin Poetry Prize (2007), and the Nobel Prize for Literature (2011). In Tranströmer’s writing, there is an authentic relationship that bridges poetic articulation and the processes of critical interpretation. It is one that hinges on the equilibrium between experience and expectation. The poetry shows tremendous control and balance. It informs an entire system of considering individual and collective perceptions, which corresponds with the terrain of phenomenological apprehensions. The importance of Tranströmer’s work is the universality that the poetry attains. In this first book-length study of Tomas Tranströmer’s work, in English, Lim Lee Ching takes on the massive task of scrutinizing all of Tranströmer’s poems.This study deals with the wide variety of ideas and issues that the poet deals with over the course of his long career, in a manner that befits their gravitas. This book is a return to the critical tradition; it provides a poem-by-poem approach to the Tranströmer corpus. This book reveals how much we have to learn from Tomas Tranströmer. This book is an important addition to all poetry, Modernist studies and Scandinavian literature collections.

The Works of Tomas Tranströmer: The Universality of Poetry (Cambria Contemporary Literature, Film, & Theory)

Literature & Fiction

Lim, Lee Ching

History & Criticism

Cambria Press

from the Back Cover Lim Lee Ching's poems resemble no other work coming from Singapore today, yet these are the poems for which Singapore has quietly yearned. In some ways, the work in this new collection is a throwback to a tradition that stretches from the early twentieth century, its revolutions of the word, to the touchingly opaque worlds of the turn of the millennium. It is haunted not only by Joyce, Loy, and Stevens, but also by Ashbery and Melnick. It suggests an albeit estranged or implicit continuation of this magisterial tradition, in the space, "the deep space between reading and seeing" perhaps, where idioms and languages meet, embrace, or fight it out. The result is revelatory of an English anchored transiently in idioms that range across diverse poetic forms, local dialects, and global drifts, and yet it is one that endures. Locked in these tensions, the work is like a dance whose steps follow the fleeting patterns of disabused expectation. Lim's poems manifest a principle known instinctively to lasting poets of any age: if it sounds right, then deform it, distort it, subvert it, at any rate do anything but leave it as it is. From a discipline of association an enduring idiom is formed, suggesting permanence in a world terrified by entropy and loss. In poems like "Bookmarks" and "Shallowbreath" Lim's work begins to stretch out into the longer forms that evidently suit his voice. The rigour demonstrated in these poems intimates an abiding poetic significance. Britta Noresten's drawings, published here alongside Lim's poems, add rhythms and textures of their own to the page and resonate with the poems in surprise. These exquisite studies in contemporary realism at once hold and embellish moments of passage and yet each time the lines and shades take flight on the page. These illustrations place a kind of magnifying glass over parts of an emerging world that is distributed equally to both drawing and writing. -- John W.P. Phillips

Pure and Faultless Elation Emerging from Hiding

Arts & Photography

Graphic Design

Delere Press

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Books by Lim, Lee Ching