An authoritative volume representing the vast oeuvre of one of the twentieth century's most brilliant and visionary poets.

Widely regarded as some of the most important and innovative poetry from postwar Europe, Tomaz Salamun's work offers a singularly thrilling reading experience. Sharp and subtle, Salamun's rhythms intertwine with an incantatory force; his prescient, liberatory politics and poetics pulse like a heartbeat. In Kiss the Eyes of Peace, the histories of Slovenia, the former Yugoslavia, and Europe are broken into kaleidoscopic harmonies of terror and joy: friends and family talk to each other under the sun as snow, apples, and deer mingle with blood and bones, with salt and cabbage, with gold, silk, and wine, and with God and heaven in the sand and grass.

"Love tore apart all my theories," writes Salamun. His oracular poems, suffused with mystic pronouncements that confound and delight, are as moving as they are eerie. And yet, if "every true poet is a monster," Salamun's profound imagination also offers us peace-grace, even-in the wildness and wilderness of his art: "May everything erupt on a clear day, just as it is, / into sacredness and the beauty of the gift: life."

Translated from the Slovenian and curated by esteemed author and translator Brian Henry, and with a Foreword from award-winning author Ilya Kaminsky, this expansive arrangement is the first of its kind to offer a comprehensive English-language retrospective of Salamun's storied career.

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About the Author

Tomaz Salamun was born in 1941 in Zagreb, Croatia, and raised in Koper, Slovenia. He is the author of more than fifty books of poetry and his work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages. A curator and conceptual artist prior to becoming an acclaimed poet, his honors include the Preseren Prize, the European Prize for Poetry, the Mladost Prize, the Jenko Prize, and a Pushcart Prize. He served as Cultural Attache to the Slovenian Embassy in New York and, in addition to serving as a Fulbright Fellow at Columbia University, held various visiting professorships across the United States. He died in Ljubjiana, Slovenia, in 2014.

Brian Henry is the translator of Tomaz Salamun's Selected Poems and Woods and Chalices, as well as Ales Debeljak's Smugglers and six books by Ales Steger, most recently Burning Tongues: New and Selected Poems. Henry is also the author of Permanent State, ten other books of poetry, and the collection of essays, Things Are Completely Simple: Poetry and Translation. His work has received numerous honors, including two NEA fellowships, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, a Howard Foundation fellowship, and the Best Translated Book Award. He lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Reviews

Praise for Kiss the Eyes of Peace

"One of the great Central European poets of the late twentieth century, the Slovene Tomaz Salamun is a madman. A master of chance, adrenaline, and inspiration, Salamun's poems don't unfold, they erupt with the volcanic energy of tumultuous times, both personal and historical. Like Blake and Whitman before him, a divine unity is at their core, and in these new translations by Brian Henry we are given the Salamunian universe, prophetic and exhilarating, created by the most flexible of poetic minds in the act of the human urge to create."-Ales Steger, author of The Book of Bodies

"Salamun's work is alive with provocation and imaginative intensity, aesthetic risk, antic intelligence, mercury, lightning."-Robert Hass, author of The Apple Trees at Olema

"This book will revolutionize the way that Tomaz Salamun is perceived by English readers. Not only is it the first comprehensive English selection from his entire body of work, uncovering many hidden gems, but it also stands as a remarkable culmination of more than two decades of dedication by Brian Henry, a poet who shared a profound connection with Tomaz. With meticulous precision and wild poetic power, Henry presents an English rendition of Salamun at its finest."-Ales Steger, author of The Book of Bodies

Praise for Tomaz Salamun

"His poems will continue to defy categorization, but they will be remembered for the way they walked the tightrope between ecstasy and despair, the rational and the irrational, the sublime and the horrible."-Paris Review

"He is too slippery to be compared to anything . . . He is, as a poet, supremely clever, and then he is also intelligent enough to dampen this cleverness in the name of poetry when he feels like it. His work is elegant and ironic and often surreal and lined with dark laughter but it can also be sharp and forbidding. Nothing is lost on him."-Guardian

"By turns brutal and coy, gnomic and blunt, the Slovenian poet . . . insistently dismembers the world, only to slyly recreate and celebrate it."-Publishers Weekly

"Salamun has exerted a great deal of influence on many younger poets . . . . He's a world-class poet. He's easily the best poet of the Balkans, and one of the best of them all."-Iowa Review

Book Information
ISBN 9781639550401
Author Toma alamun
Format Hardback
Page Count 264
Imprint Milkweed Editions
Publisher Milkweed Editions