In a fit of recklessness I'm sending the book by air mail so you won't have to wait till Christmas. As you know, literary life in Sweden is played out in the daily papers and where well-known authors are concerned you get reviewed the same day the book comes out. In other words my sentence has been pronounced. In the most influential paper, Dagens Nyheter, one of the younger critics wrote that I was unalterably the same, somewhat worse now however than in my first book from 1954. He praised me too, but for the initiated it was immediately clear that I've been knocked off my pedestal. It's like in China-if Chou suddenly stands number 5 after Mao instead of number 3, bit means that Chou is half dead. The expert understands that. However, the stupid general public* has bought my book (1100 copies were sold the first two weeks).

Thank you for your book! I have been eating it up like those wonderful dates that come with pictures of camels on the package-in one of your earlier lives you were a camel-(that's why you're able to go for miles through the desert) (that's why you know where the oases are-cf your Monica!) Anyway the book is very good, and I'm enjoying it tremendously. As I read in it I say, "Well, look at all the things I haven't done yet!" So it reminds me of poems I might write sometime in the future, so it's a future book, the kind I like best. You do some very strange things in this book. I translated for Carolyn [Bly] your poem about walking in the woods, and evil shaking his head across a desk, and the modern building with so much glass, and finally the airport scene. She was startled and moved. And with her true sense, which never fails, excited by something new, that is moving forward, just at the edge of the forest. The trains that meet in the (station of this) poem come from such long distances, each of them! That is what is good! One train still has snow on it, another one has a palm leaf caught in the undercarriage-Oh you're a bloody genius!. Book jacket.