Some poets command our attention by the quietness of their voices. Their words seem to emerge out of silence itself. They move us powerfully and yet their power is hard to define. In most modern poems, words, however bound up with the things they evoke, echo other words. When Wallace Stevens writes, “Shall I uncrumple this much-crumpled thing?” he appears to be alluding to a piece of paper — and, of course, he is — but it’s the homely succulence of “crumple” that seizes our attention; the word has strangely supplanted the action. In a few poets, the necessary veil which words insert between ourselves and the world disappears. Their poems disturb because we feel, behind their words or even between them, the pressure of the stillness from which they’re born.

Different peoples have different silences. But Swedish silence must be among the most intense anywhere. In a Bergman film, it is the wintry silences — of the landscape as well as of the tortured protagonists — which pierce us most. Another Swedish master of this spooky mutedness is the poet Tomas Tranströmer. For over half a century, since his “17 Poems” first appeared in 1954, he has been writing poems punctuated by sharp flashes of stillness. The effect is both intimate and disconcerting.

In “The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems” (New Directions, 241 pages, $16.95), the Scottish poet and translator Robin Fulton has now made Mr. Tranströmer’s distinctive verse fully available to American readers. The translations, which Mr. Fulton has been polishing for decades, are excellent. In their accuracy and their elegance, they easily supersede the versions published in the 1970s, first by May Swenson, then by Robert Bly, superb — and pioneering — as those were. Here, for example, in its entirety, is “Elegy,” from the 1973 collection “Paths,” in Mr. Fulton’s translation:

I open the first door.
It’s a large sunlit room.
A heavy car on the street passes and makes the porcelain tremble.
I open door number two.
Friends! You drank the darkness and became visible.
Door number three. A narrow hotel room.
Outlook on a back street.
A lamp sparking on the asphalt.
Beautiful slag of experiences.

The little poem is as baffling as it is simple. Between two instants of light—the sunlit room and the sparking streetlamp — what has been invisible becomes visible, but only through the action of darkness. Are these memories or fragments of dream? The three successive doors suggest a fairytale each one opens on a mystery. The more I ponder it, the more the poem seems an elegy not only for those vanished friends brought back to the eyes by darkness, but for just such inconspicuous and unremarkable moments. Slag remains behind when the ore has been extracted, but here slag is the rubble of lost moments, all those discards of time whose beauty we appreciate only in retrospect.

Mr. Tranströmer is not a professional “man of letters.” For many years he worked as a clinical psychologist and counselled juvenile delinquents at a prison in Linköping In 1990, he suffered a stroke which left him speechless for a time and partially paralyzed. But he continued to write, and in 1996 he could say of himself, in the poem “April and Silence,”

I am carried in my shadow like a violin in its black case.
The only thing I want to say glitters out of reach like the silver in a pawnbroker’s.

For all the acclaim which Mr. Tranströmer has justly received over the years — he’s won almost every prize and award on offer — he remains an unclassifiable poet. Whether composing haiku or such long magnificent sequences as “Baltics,” about his sea-going ancestors, his tone is persistently intimate. His poems have the power of confidences whispered into the ear. And yet even this is misleading. For the secrets he divulges have been brought back from the world we all inhabit; they are, in a way, public secrets that he somehow transforms into private disclosures. Though he can be scathing about “the pious executioner,” a figure we know well these days, he is also alert to “the scream of a child left alone in a hospital bed when the parents leave.”

In “About History,” he invokes “the sun that also whispers in a microphone under the covering of the ice.” This is the voice of his poems as well. Like the sun’s shining whisper, Mr. Tranströmer’s voice is magnified by silence until it reaches every corner of the room.

eormsby@nysun.com