Poem of the Week

Prose Poem by Tomas Transtromer

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Right now I’m on a road trip, driving from California to Minnesota. Yesterday I hiked in Zion National Park and then drove for many hours through unfamiliar Utah mountains. These were mountains that seemed to demand silence, so I turned off the music and contemplated them, listening to what they had to say to me, which was something along the lines of why don’t you live here, where you could be silent most of the time and no one would care, no one would notice, because all there are here are mountains and desert and vastness. I was 18 the first time the west drew me to itself, and I wish I had a whole other lifetime to see what life would be like in this unearthly land. This poem –that line Our life has a sister vessel which plies another route– is what the west feels like to me.

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Tomas Transtomer is a Nobel laureate poet of Sweden . Perhaps obscurity of his fame is due to the limited translation as he wrote in Swedish. His poetry is striking due to

Magical metaphors

Deepness

Spirituality

Simple language.

Sometimes he cast spells with surrealism like Charles Simic . It's always nice to read him in a solitary night , words drop like pit pat on the tympanic membrane and draw the reader to a stoic and mysterious world.

He wrote many Haikus and many of his poems are sleek and slim in a frame of visual fixation.

This prose poem was written by him, in the background is Utah mountains of America. I think during real travelling experience he wrote it.

Actually he is the master of desolation.

Dr Pragya Suman