The Great Enigma

The collected poems of one of the world's greatest living writers, Tomas Transtromer, available in this comprehensive edition. In day's first hours consciousness can grasp the world as the hand grips a sun-warmed stone. Translated into fifty languages, the poetry of Tomas Transtromer has had a profound influence around the world, an influence that has steadily grown and has now attained a prominence comparable to that of Pablo Neruda's during his lifetime. But if Neruda is blazing fire, Transtromer is expanding ice. The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems gathers all the poems Tomas Transtromer has published, from his distinctive first collection in 1954, 17 Poems, through his epic poem Baltics ("my most consistent attempt to write music"), and The Sad Gondola, published six years after he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1990 ("I am carried in my shadow / like a violin / in its black case."), to his most recent slim book, The Great Enigma, published in Sweden in 2004. Also included is his prose-memoir Memories Look at Me, containing keys into his intensely spiritual, metaphysical poetry (like the brief passage of insect collecting on Runmaro Island when he was a teenager). Firmly rooted in the natural world, his work falls between dream and dream; it probes "the great unsolved love" with the opening up, through subtle modulations, of "concrete words."

One of the most difficult portions of the New Testament to consider and discuss with any real sense of certainty is the book of Revelation. While its title in Greek means to "uncover," or "disclose," the book seems to be more confounding in its content than enlightening for contemporary readers. So we might ask, "How could such an elusive and complicated text come to be called Revelation?" Considering the diversity of opinions and interpretations of the book, would it be more fitting to call it The Great Enigma? Even the author himself seems perplexed at times by what he hears and sees... "Astonished" is the term he uses in Revelation 17:7. While my intent certainly isn't to disparage the author by inferring that the book defies beneficial definition, it is to face the truth of the rather perplexing place Revelation holds in Christian literature.

A collection of over 175 poems by Swedish author Tomas Tranströmer.

Stephen Jay Gould borrowed from Winston Churchill when he described the conodont animal as a "riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." This animal confounded science for more than a century. Some thought it a slug, others a fish, a worm, a plant, even a primitive ancestor of ourselves. The list of possibilities grew and yet an answer to the riddle never seemed any nearer. Would the animal that left behind these miniscule fossils known as conodonts ever be identified? Three times the animal was "found," but each was quite a different animal. Were any of them really the one? Simon J. Knell takes the reader on a journey through 150 years of scientific thinking, imagining, and arguing. Slowly the animal begins to reveal traces of itself: its lifestyle, its remarkable evolution, its witnessing of great catastrophes, its movements over the surface of the planet, and finally its anatomy. Today the conodont animal remains perhaps the most disputed creature in the zoological world.

This is a collection of all the poems Transtromer has written over the past 40 years. His poems are often explorations of the borderland between sleep and waking, between the conscious and the dreaming states."