The Star By My Head

Poets from Sweden

Malena Mörling, Jonas Ellerström

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781571319036
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Published in partnership with the Poetry Foundation, this breathtaking anthology features eight of Sweden's most highly regarded poets.

From Edith Södergran to Gunnar Ekelöf to Nobel Prize-winning Tomas Tranströmer, Sweden has long been home to a rich and luminous poetic tradition, notable for refreshing openness, striking honesty, and a rare transcendence that often springs from a keen attention to the natural world. In the poems of The Star by My Head, which begin in the early twentieth century and come up to the present day, pinecones cluster out of reach and lilacs attempt their tentative rebirth each year. A bee makes a face like a newborn's. A name etched in vapor on a windowpane, and its erasure, brings happiness.

With exquisite translations by internationally acclaimed poets and translators Malena Mörling and Jonas Ellerström offered alongside the Swedish originals, The Star by My Head is an essential bilingual volume and the premiere American anthology of its kind.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction Malena Mörling
• Edith Södergran (1892–1923)
• Gunnar Ekelöf (1907–1968)
• Werner Aspenström (1918–1997)
• Tomas Tranströmer (1931–)
• Tua Forsström (1947–)
• Kristina Lugn (1948–)
• Marie Lundquist (1950–)
• Bruno K. Öijer (1951–)
• A Brief History of Modern Swedish Poetry Jonas Ellerström