Tomas Transtromer. Transtromer is a Swedish poet, born in 1931. By profession, he is a Psychologist. His profession tinges his poetry only slightly, as he largely avoids using any psychological terminology or any of its concepts and categories. He is, however, interested in dreams, boundaries, and the transition from one state to another. Twilight, dawn, shifts in the weather, the threshold between inner and outer, sleep and waking, wellness and Illness, houses and sky, all feature in his poetry, but not in a psychoanalytic way. Poetry is more precise than psychology. Apparently, his poems carry over well in translation. There is a visual clarity in his poetry, an unpressured use of language characteristic of a moderate man. His poems are not driven, either by outside terrors, political or otherwise, or by inner demons and neuroses. But he is open to the occasional quiet epiphany. Good man. We all need the door to swing open slightly now and then in our lives. The poem I’ve chosen is an experience I can relate to, as the same weird panic happened once to me on waking. But I was a teenager then, and doing drugs a lot more exotic than just this legal alcohol crap I’ve been reduced to now. Oh, and the other reason I like this is that it is such a psychological conception of the utmost Hell. Traditional theology links the state of Hell to a knowledge of the Self as a thing separate from God. That is precisely the burden of knowledge, the loss of innocence, what happens to you when you eat a Kerr’s Pink offered by some woman in league with the serpent. Utmost Hell is to be damned, and then to lose the one thing you clinged onto in your damnation: your Self. Whoa.. maybe this dude really is a psychologist! Or a psychotheologist! WTF? God, how did you and your dad get on? That was a whole different creation, dude. Not relevant. [The Name]