During the same period, time has run out for several prominent female poets, the Dane Inger Christensen passed away in 2009, the Austrian Friedrieke Mayröcker has turned 95. Louise Glück was born in 1943 and has received the most awards a poet can receive in the USA, now also the Nobel Prize.

Her poetry has been described

as autobiographical, but it is more accurate to say that she makes personal, individual experiences universal.

The poems are often based on the family, a cramped world where "my mother threw kisses as usual / because it scares her that a hand is not used for anything".

The lines are from one of the two collections of poems available in Swedish, "Ararat", the mother is dead and buried in Mount Ararat's cemetery, but the title of the collection of poems could just as easily be about the Ararat where Noak stranded: Glück's poetry is never private but conveys universal feelings with a sparse precision that makes each observation unique, as if she had seen something for the very first time.

And the ancient myths are always present, even when they are not mentioned;

Glück writes about the eternal in the human situation, about pain, wounds, sorrow.

Glück belongs to a tradition

that has roots back to the poet Emily Dickinson who wrote most of his poems in the 1860s, a hundred years before Glück made his debut.

They both have a treacherous simplicity in common, an everydayness in the address that creeps in breathtaking thoughts, "No one sees God and survives" writes Dickinson, "the people in the hospital beds are as uncontrollable as dreams", Glück answers.

This prize is also a prize for poetry, for the translators Stewe Claesson and Jonas Brun who have translated into Swedish, for the small publishing house Rámus and for the readers.

Poetry is a repressed kind of literature, the editions are small, the audience is often small, but the density is high.

Good poems can survive centuries and surprise unprepared readers with lines that provide access to unimaginable depths.

The prize for Glück is a surprise and a fantastic opportunity to experience great poetry.