The Wind Itself

£8.25

Werner Aspenström's poems cover an astonishing range of imaginative territory. The scene in a pizza parlour al lunchtime turns into a meditation about space, time migration and the age of the Universe. A barker's spiel becomes a dramatic history of the world, told backwards.

A woodcutter grumbles and niggles as he journeys to Heaven; Strindberg offers an opinion on an ornithological question; waves and pebbles rap out poems of their own.

Hans Anderson is himself told the tale of "how the world's tree flowered"... Mysterious, funny, touching, exhilarating and unpredictable, these translations offer readers the chance to enter a very special world indeed.

Werner Aspenström, born 1918, was one of the most distinguished of the generation of poets who came to prominence after 1945. He was also a dramatist and author of evocative prose pieces. He died in 1997.

Robin Young, born 1944, is a scholar and translator with a special interest in the Scandinavian literatures. From 1973 to 1997, he taught at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. An Ibsen-study, Time's Disinherited Children, appeared in 1989.