Baltics

Tranströmer's long poem in six parts — a meditation on family history, the Baltic landscape, and the relationship between personal memory and geological/historical time.

Tranströmer's most sustained single work: a long poem that moves between personal memory, family history (centered on the island of Runmarö in the Stockholm archipelago), and the vast impersonal time of geology and history. The Baltic as a mediating figure: connecting Sweden to its complicated historical neighbors. An expansion of Tranströmer's characteristic technique to a larger canvas.