Long celebrated as a master of the arresting, suggestive image, Transtromer is a poet of the liminal: drawn again and again to thresholds of light and of water, the boundaries between man and nature, wakefulness and dream. A deeply spiritual but secular writer, his scepticism about humanity is continually challenged by the implacable renewing power of the natural world. His poems are epiphanies rooted in experience: spare, luminous meditations that his extraordinary images split open - exposing something sudden, mysterious and unforgettable.

    Translated from the Swedish by Johannes Goransson. Born in Russia to German-Baltic parents, Henry Parland (1908-1930) grew up in Finland and joined up with the Finland-Swedish Modernists as a teenager. Out of these linguistic and cultural convergences and displacements, Parland created a highly cosmopolitan poetry--influenced by avant-gardes from many corners of Europe and America, as well as jazz and Charlie Chaplin--that remains a powerful presence in modern Scandinavian literature. "Just when you thought there were no more discoveries to be made in modernist poetry, along comes a Finno-Swedish Russian German Lithuanian teen prodigy from the 1920's, Henry Parland, in Johannes Goransson's zippy translation. Did anyone ever pack so much delightful weirdness into so few lines?"--Eliot Weinberg.

    Afterlife is an abridged version of Heaven and Hell, with passages specially chosen to highlight the essence of Swedenborg's work.