A Time in Xanadu by Lars Gustafsson

A review by Robert Archambeau

With the exception of Tomas Transtromer, Swedish poets have not had much exposure in the United States, and inasmuch as we can say there is an American sense of what Swedish poetry is like, it is a sense derived from Transtromer's work: a spare poetry, a little modernist, a little lyric, a bit existential, with hints of quiet mysticism. This is actually a fairly accurate picture of much poetry written by Transtromer's generation. It certainly pertains to the work of Lars Gustafsson, one of Sweden's most prolific poets and novelists. When we read Gustafsson side-by-side with a younger Swedish poet such as Fredrik Nyberg, though, we can see how far Swedish poetry has moved in a generation. The two poets are separated by three decades (Gustafsson was born in 1936, Nyberg in 1968), and the gulf between them is not just a matter of temporal points of reference. At some time between Gustafsson's formative years and Nyberg's, poetry underwent what in the history of philosophy is often...

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