A slightly different take on the auld author recommendation from Tom Sheehan who has written about a personal experience as a connection with this poet
Tomas Transtromer by Tom Sheehan
At MGH, the 8-9-year-old girl picks up Tomas Transtromer’s book, “Selected Poems,” which my son Jamie in the waiting room had just put down, and she walks away with it. I wonder where she is now.
I was still in the operating room at the end of a long day, and a long week, the new bypass valve, with a serial number to follow its use and application (success or failure) printed on a card the size of a business card and presented to me, I would now carry the valve or it would carry me, breath upon breath, for I remembered, with unusual clarity my recent inability to take a deep breath, my gasps at my son, reaching him for a final hug, his arm coming across my shoulders, indeed the hug of all hugs, two emergency room doctors measuring the scene, and the flurry of nurses marking the background..
Long after that eventful day, the aortic replacement valve at work, the serial number card tucked away in a back-pocket wallet, my son told me how he had spent much of his time in the waiting room during the operation, reading a book taking away a batch of worry and concern with the words, the poems, the music of them, his lyrical hunger in transplant, a doing getting done the best way possible and feasible.
The book was a Selected Poems by Swedish poet, Tomas Transtromer, a thin volume by a variety of standards, but thick with beauty, understanding, and a comprehension of the moment, the situation, read the words or found the comparable meaning carried in supportive lines he grasped for his own for the time. That’s what some poems do, become your personal poems, pick you up and carry you off to another self, your own words, thoughts, intentions, coming free of the mind of somebody else’s for your taking.
Many of you know of a poem or poems that carry the whole field for you, instant recognition, instant return to first explosion of their unbelievable understanding and statement which are mere words gathered for your needed inhalation. There have been times I must have been breathless just before a poem gathered me in its arms as my son gathered me to him in the hospital.
I knew that feeling as a freshman at Boston College when my English professor, John Norton, summoned me to his office after a few weeks of class on my return from Korea, and tossing an open book across his desk to me, saying, “Have you ever read that poem?” I read, for the first time, “Shot Down at Night” by John F. Nims, saying, at length and swallow to myself, “I thought I was writing poetry all this time.”
“A boy I once knew, arms gold as saddle leather, lakeblue eyes, found in foreign sky extravagant death. Dreamy in school, parsed tragic Phaeton, heard of war, arose surprised, gravely shook hands and left us. His name once grey in convent writing, neat on themes, cut like erosion of fire the peaks of heaven. The Arab saw strange flotsam fall, the baseball sounding spring, the summer roadster pennoned with bright hair, the Halloween dance, the skaters’ kiss at midnight on the carillons of ice.” (Not Tn its form.)
How many times had I recited it for comrades in Korea. Somehow, it bears repeating.
literally stories 
Tom
We are getting some impressive author pieces, and this is just as high quality. The good books we read to take our minds off a worrisome situation are blessings.
Leils
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Back in the day — just a few months ago, in fact — the now extinct Reader’s Digest ran a regular feature called “My Most Unforgettable Character.” Tom Sheehan, for his marked literary ability and the interesting backstory in which he is cloaked, would have made an ideal subject for that feature. Intriguing once more, Tom.
Bill Tope
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I enjoyed the interweaving of personal experiences and the poetry and the impact on the life of TS. A Nice Sunday treat.
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Dear Tom,
When civilization collapses and all other writing from a society disappears into air, into thin air, it’s always the few true poets whose work survives (and the few who write like true poets). This iron law has been true in the distant past as surely as it will be true in the future.
Thanks for introducing me to a poet I’ve never read before. Because of your deeply personal recommendation, I very much look forward to exploring more of his work. Greatly appreciated.
Sincerely,
Dale
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Another moving piece. I appreciate the work.
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Tom got it right.
Borges seems to have thought new readers of every poem, story, and every novel that captured them RE-WRITES it over again, because it was absorbed in a new way by every new brain for a different time or place. The words being left ” . . . for your taking” are impossible to plagiarize or co-opt. We make it ours. Music can make us fly, too.
Poor fools. We thought we were writing “all this time.” Maybe we were — just my reading deep within us, just by struggling together to write anything.
It’s lonely out there.
Gerry
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Gerry,
This is a great interpretation/explication of, and reflection on, one of my very favorite writers, Borges. Blind like Homer, his mind was full of the labyrinth and the mirror that is literature. Thanks so much!!
Sincerely,
Dale
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I was struck by Tom’s closing words: ‘Somehow, it bears repeating.’ Dead right. We can enjoy the occasional re-reading of a story or novel, but great poetry never grows stale, no matter how often it’s repeated. Indeed, fondness grows with repetition, and there are some occasions, some feelings, that we can only adequately express by quoting remembered lines from a great poem. I imagine that’s always been the case and I hope it will always continue.
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I usually haven’t read the Auld Authors featured, but Tomas Transtromer is one I have. I wholeheartedly agree with your description of his poems as ‘thick with beauty, understanding, and a comprehension of the moment’. His writing has a smallness to it that manages to contain so much – a simplicity, but a real emotional depth – one of my favourites.
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Hi Tom,
You write with class no matter what you take on.
All the very best my fine friend.
Hugh
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