Tomas Tranströmer, the beloved Swedish poet and Nobel laureate, has passed away at age 83. Tranströmer was notable for the economy of his work, its quiet optimism, and the insights it brought from the poet’s long career as an industrial psychologist. His work took on additional resonance when a stroke in 1990 left the poet unable to speak. His verse, however, continued to flourish. As Andrew Brown writes in the Guardian:
He was alive to movement, and to change. A cabbage white butterfly might in his poetry become “a fluttering corner of truth itself”.
