The first thing one notices about Harry Martinson's poems is their precision and over-all exactitude…. Always the precision takes on its own life, moves from impression to expression but without disturbing its own clear-pond-like surface…. [His] attention to actual "things" is nothing less than reverence, the everyday magic that keeps banality out of the everyday and out of Martinson's poems. Thus he can write a difficult (borderline sentimental) Wright-like elegy like "No Name for It" [in Friends, You Drank Some Darkness] with almost frustrating ease….

The second thing one notices about these poems is stillness. It is the blood of every word Martinson writes, and it winds without a seam around a major theme in Scandinavian literature from Strindberg to the present: the holy solitude of travelers. The small lyric "March Evening" … is a made-to-order example…. (p. 76)

Using precision, stillness, and the solitude of travelers, Martinson strings a...