The book was reviewed in Publishers Weekly, where the critic wrote that while the author's stroke is never mentioned explicitly, the collection "centers unmistakably on the controlled anguish that the 66-year-old poet's physical condition--and encroaching mortality--imposes." The review continued: "What saves the collection from morbidness is the formal beauty and remorselessly compressed clarity of the writing. Indeed, the almost telegraphic brevity of the poems is the volume's only concession to Transtromer's handicap. With the exception of the four-page title poem, a meditation on Wagner's final months, most of the pieces are only a few stanzas long, yet they retain all the force of the poet's earlier work."[2]
