To find a new poet who speaks as we speak, who says the things we need to hear, but in another language, is to be filled again, to find the next place. And if he is a world-poet living in our time. And if he brings us a strange music, music of our own thoughts and nights, a sense of light-struck magnificence and of the horrors, of stubborn affirmation; and the filth of cruelty, death, and sexual madness. And if his poems fall into their riches, lyrics, long coherent processions, a kind of theatre, amazing new and sudden lyrics, reaching us in another way, like a new touch on us? This is Gunnar Ekelöf. (p. 5)

Fierce, magnificent music is given to us by Ekelöf, past the building of joy and the imperative which ends [the poem] "Euphoria." "He attempts to free himself from the dualistic moral conceptions," says Johannes Edfelt …, "and find a 'third' point of view."

If one climbed the hills to the top hills of a watershed and found there a yellow door, not set in a wall but standing free in air; if one could see the further hills and all the streams flowing away on the other side; but set hand to that door, opened it, and walked through, to find all different-colored, differently lit, otherwise, on the far side, that would be something of the change these poems make, that unique resonance of a new and formidable poet. (p. 8)