Compass Bearing

Poetry. Translated from the Swedish by Hildred Crill. Per Wästberg's poems move through landscape and memory recreating neighborhoods, houses and docks in sharp detail while at the same time contemplating invisible forces:

Time's bones are brittle
and the cold bath house in a deplorable state.
Insurance for longhorn beetle not paid.
The cuckoo calls from a large saucepan.
Under a thinned sky we dip
into sweetness of overripe fruit.
The self-analytical shadows pass
over the spirit level's blind eye.

The poems track the interior of the self as well as imagined lives of others through time, through childhood, youth, love and death. Yet they give no easy determination of place, no simplistic discovery of direction. Even the process of dying is closely and slowly observed in advance, both the physicality ("Like when you let go of a load of wood and pull off an icy glove") and the ineffable ("But the alphabet still glows, like asteroids over the expanses of snow"). COMPASS BEARING presents twenty of Wästberg's poems in translation selected from his 2004 collection, Tillbaka i tid (Back in Time), poems that span more than five decades.

Per Wästberg is the chairman of the Nobel Committee for Literature. He founded the Swedish Section of Amnesty International in 1963, and was deeply involved in the anti- apartheid struggle in South Africa. From 1976 to 1982 he was the editor of Sweden's largest daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter. He was president of International PEN from 1979 to 1986. He is the author of fifty publications, including novels, poetry, essays and works on African politics and literature.