His exquisite compression and vividly cinematic imagery are instantly attractive, but the elemental sparseness of his language can often be rendered as colourless and bland. The supple rhythms of the original poems are hard to replicate and, equally, the plosive musicality of Swedish words like “domkyrkoklocklang” lose all their aural resonance when they become a “peal of cathedral bells.” His empty, numinous landscape is comfortably familiar to Northern poets, but his metaphysical parsing of that landscape into minimal Swedish can often prove too challenging.