Feast

by Tomaz Salamun

Overview

To read Tomaž Šalamun is to understand the delights of contemporary poetry. He is one of the major names in the international avant-garde. Irreverent, self-mythologizing, tragic, and visionary, he is a poet of immense range and cunning, able to encompass everything from Balkan wars and politics to the most intimate personal experiences. Feast, his latest collection in English, brings together both early and more recent work. "Realism, surrealism, song. Aphorisms, lyric, anti-lyric," as Jorie Graham wrote, are all to be found in these poems. Here is the most blasphemous of poets who is also a great religious poet. "Throw open a window, pull up a chair, and enjoy the imaginative feast" (Edward Hirsch).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780544343689
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	09/16/2014
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	112
File size:	275 KB

About the Author

Tomaž Šalamun was born in 1941 in Zagreb. He has published over thirty books of poetry and frequently teaches at American universities, including Pittsburgh, Richmond, and Texas.

What People are Saying About This

Jorie Graham

[Salamun is] one of Europe's great philosophical wonders.

Edward Hirsch

Throw open a window, pull up a chair, and enjoy the imaginative feast.

Editorial Reviews

Salamun presents a sensual spread, a carnage nourishing in its transport.

Rain Taxi

By turns brutal and coy, gnomic and blunt, the Slovenian poet Salamun's third English-language collection insistently dismembers the world, only to slyly recreate and celebrate it. Edited by Charles Simic, this volume presents translations of Salamun's recent and older work, as did 1997's The Four Questions of Melancholy and 1988's Selected Poems, the latter also edited by Simic. Uneven and variegated, Feast presents everything from throwaway one-liners to beautifully muted lyrics and wildly excessive, surreal investigations of daily life. Salamun excels when working in the last mode, and the strongest poems here offer a Whitmanic breadth steeped in an absurdity that is caustic yet humane: "A windowpane yields no warmth. Who// made it transparent? Who owns the energy/ nibbling under the teeth? Have you ever spilled/ a bucket in the desert? Like throwing snow to the hens." Though Salamun's approach varies, the poems frequently have recourse to fantastic questions, using the interrogative mode to aggressively probe ancient philosophical conundrums about form and matter, perception and reality. They lead not to reductive, systematically organized knowledge, but to reveries on the poet's ability to remake experience in a world that is endlessly destructive: "I felt blood under your chopping block. The doe turns/ into a bird and takes flight. It's heavy. It barely/ gets off the ground. Branches rub the belly of the doe." While Feast is rife with powerful transformations, Salamun's relentless pursuit of metaphor can lead to tiresome shaggy dog stories, and many poems contain both magical and infantile moments. But the best poems here simultaneously pursue and violently undermine knowledge ("...the enemy, logic and elegance, the beaten track/ of the perfect instrument. You have to crush it...") to create a fierce, intelligent lyricism. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Feast, Salamun's 27th book of poetry, is a seamless collaboration between the poet and seven translators. The result is an arresting and often outrageous collection of surrealist lyrics, sonnets, aphorisms, and epigrams. For Salamun, "language is a hook, it catches nothing." So he proceeds to capture "the hidden," which always eludes "mummified academicians." Yet he is also capable of acerbic self-deprecation: "The greatest Slavic poet. Right." Salamun's daring poetics will transform the reader used to a diet of conventional poetry. Feast is strong, original, and always fresh: "I breathe and a poem jumps up." Recommended for all academic collections.--Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, IL Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Library Journal

Salamun is Slovenia's foremost living poet and the budding nation's former consul in New York. He is a wry fantasist with the surrealist gift for striking and unlikely juxtapositions, his best work shows flashes of a sardonic, almost caustic wit. Many of the 65 poems here threaten to turn into lengthy catalogues of non sequiturs, but Šalamun's sure metrical grasp and deft manipulation of line breaks and stanza forms keep them moving forward, often in a headlong plunge of cracked metaphors and hermetic images. The less cryptic poems, such as "Dolmen" and "Jonah," have a stark, bittersweet power. In their accumulation of images of violence and ominous observations like "Human lives are fluff," several of the poems obliquely acknowledge the turmoil in the former Republic of Yugoslavia (a turmoil that Slovenia has been happily spared). But for the most part, the work here is more obscure but clever enough to warrant re-reading. At his worst, Šalamun is difficult and esoteric to the point of opaqueness, with lines like "There are demolished stones in the tub when the sky is stretched," but in the same poem one can find metaphors of stark lucidity: "The castle has a terrible face." The translations, most of them by the poet himself with either Christopher Merrill or Phyllis Levin, are deft. One wishes that the poems were dated somewhere, as Simic has apparently drawn from all of Šalamun's career output in this volume.

Kirkus Reviews

"It is a good thing to have Šalamun's work in English. Some of it is very funny and graceful. All of it has provocation and imaginative intensity and aesthetic risk."—Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United States.
"Šalamun's poems...are comic, worldly, political, and blasphemous."—James Tate, author of Shroud of the Gnome.

From the Publisher