Obscure Swedish poet or magnificent writer? You'd be forgiven, reading reactions to the naming of Tomas Tranströmer as the Nobel laureate for literature, for getting a little confused.

Commentary ranges from the delighted to the bemused to the angry, so let's start with Tranströmer himself. Largely unable to speak since a stroke in 1990, his wife Monica told the media that he was "surprised, very surprised" to win. "It happened very fast. We thought the winners would be told ahead of the announcement. I think Tomas was called four minutes before the announcement was made," she said. It means, she added, that "the speculation of previous years has ended" (the Swedish poet has long been a favourite to take the prize). "I must say I feel happiness, one has to feel happy about it," she said, while in a release issued by his Swedish publisher Bonnier, she added that they'll be celebrating by having "fish for dinner, but the rest is a surprise".

The hurrah for Tranströmer crew is led by Paul Muldoon, writing in the New Yorker, that it is "truly heartwarming" to see him win, adding that "Sweden should be proud to honour a poet who has meant so much to the rest of us throughout the world and who confirms the notion held by many of us that poetry is no less politically charged when it examines the interior world of kettle-boiling and hearsay than when it more obviously takes on the exterior world of 'burning witches and heretics in the boiling squares,' as the great Derek Mahon once put it". Teju Cole, also writing on the New Yorker blog, calls Tranströmer one of his "ports of refuge" in a beautiful, affectionate hymn of praise to a poet who he reads "when I wish to come as close as possible to what cannot be said". I love the line he quotes from Tranströmer describing New York, as "a high place where with one glance you take in the houses where eight million human beings live".

Sigrid Rausing, at Granta, is also in celebratory mode. "No poet expresses better the drift between now, then, and eternity; the sadness at the heart of nostalgia," she writes. "No poet expresses better the relationship between humans and the natural world. The black and melancholy seas, the drifting seagulls, the oaks and elks, the storms, rowanberries, the moon and stars, the well, salt, and wolves are agents rather than background; they are what the world is, as much as we are. It's dark, and thoughtful. It is, also, bleakly intelligent."

But Peter Englund's hope that Tranströmer's nationality would be a "secondary" issue, as the poet is "already a part of world literature", is already dashed, with the ju- ry's decision to overlook America (and Asia, Africa, etc) provoking, as the Washing- ton Post put it, a "who?" and a "huh?". Philip Hensher in the Telegraph is largely unimpressed: "Time has shown every single Swedish winner of the prize to be 'a little phenomenon of no interest' outside their own country, as one disgruntled juror described William Golding in the year he won. What will it do for this popular Stockholm favourite?" he asks, later pointing to one of Tranströmer's haikus, "which per- haps has more of a swing to it in Swedish: 'My happiness swelled/and the frogs sang in the bogs/of Pomerania.'"

Tim Parks at the New York Review of Books blog doesn't think much of the whole judging process – "eighteen (or sixteen) Swedish nationals will have a certain credibil- ity when weighing up works of Swedish literature, but what group could ever really get its mind round the infinitely varied work of scores of different traditions," he writes – while Hephzibah Anderson at Bloomberg was fiercely negative. "Literature's newest Nobel laureate is widely read, reviewed and respected. In Sweden, that is. Despite having been translated into more than 50 languages, poet Tomas Tranströmer is best known internationally as one of those arcane names that draw perennial bets from Nobel-watchers fond of mocking the Swedish Academy," she writes. She goes on to state that "his victory does nothing to restore the standing of a prize whose de- cisions have increasingly courted accusations of Eurocentricity, political motivation and anti-Americanism" and to criticise the prize for its "perverse preference for au- thors obscure, politically correct or downright unreadable (all three in the case of Elfriede Jelinek)".

While I can see the point she's making, I actually rather like it when the Nobel goes to someone I haven't read before. Sampling the poems of Tranströmer which are available online, I am rather swept off my feet; reading appreciations of him by people I respect, I am most definitely going to get my hands on his New Collected Poems, which is where, along with The Half-Finished Heaven, we are told to start by the Nobel committee's Peter Englund. Although the Associated Press is reporting that his work is out of stock, Neil Astley at his UK publisher Bloodaxe tells me he is currently rushing through a reprint of 4,000 copies, with an ebook to be released by the end of next week. Great news.

Alison Flood, The Guardian, 7 October 2011