Today, I am paging through a few books of poetry by Robin Fulton. To me, he has always been "the guy who translates Transtromer" (and a shelf full of other poets I admire,) but I recently came across this poem of his in an anthology and thought I should take a deeper look. Googling his own poetry is really tough if you don't have a title to search. He's so tied to Transtromer that's almost always what you get. But, here ya go:
Something like a sky
Something in us has suddenly cleared.
Something like a sky.
Something like a still-life, alive.
Behind us, our footsteps and voices.
Behind all the walls, a wide silence.
The air is white and open, ready for snow.
Robin Fulton
This is from his collection Fields of Focus and it reminds me quite a bit of the Transtromer poem 2 A.M. And why that last line, "the air is white and open, ready for snow", gives me such a lovely shiver I don't don't quite know.
5 comments:
Great poem!
I'm not familiar with Fulton, which means I'm not reading my Tanstromer (whom I love) closely enough.
Greg, good to hear from you. I hope to put up a few more but, like I said in the post they're hard to find. Which means I will have to get off my lazy ass and type them up. Stranger things have happened.
thank you for this. I was only familiar with Bly's translations. How do you think they compare?
BG, that's Fulton's own poem from his book Fields of Focus. We got the book Saturday. It really looks great my friend!! Thank you.
That's a terrific poem. I especially admire poets who do short well. I have Fulton's translations of Transtromer, too. Not bad.
But prefer Patchen to all this!
Post a Comment