I spent early summer days with Airmail: The Letters of Tomas Tranströmer and Robert Bly (Bloodaxe Books). In March 1964 Bly drove across Minnesota to borrow Tranströmer's latest collection from a library. On his return he found a letter from the Swedish poet. With this coincidence began 26 years of letters. It's an elegant, humorous and illuminating collection.

Gaito Gadzanov's The Spectre of Alexander Wolf (Pushkin Press) is a thrilling literary mystery in which a discovered short story relates the killing of a soldier . . . from the dead man's perspective. Gadzanov is a modernist master. I hope for more work in as stylish a translation as Bryan Karetnyk's.

One of the most exciting Irish publications this year is Máire Mhac an tSaoi's Marbhnaí Duino (Leabhar Breac). Rilke's Duino Elegies, 10 long poems written over a decade, reflect mortality and a broken modern consciousness. Yet the language is lambent, often ecstatic, and it finds an astounding echo in Mhac an tSaoi's translations.

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