Sublime

It was like her mother’s, floral and sweet, but also bright, like blankets dried in the sun.

The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about. High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained, stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows, slowly revealed in the reluctant light.

The images with which Tranströmer charges his poems bring to mind the concept of acheiropoieta, “making without hands”; in Byzantine art, acheiropoietic images were those believed to have come miraculously into being without a painter’s intervention. The Shroud of Turin and the Veil of Veronica are the most famous examples.

Gretel had heard of the magic flower Moly which screamed when it was pulled up by the roots; could there be screaming bushes as well?

Bullfinch’s Mythology is a well-known English collection of Greek, Roman, and medieval European legends,