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by Tomaz Salamun (Author), Brian Henry (Translator)
Finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize
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.Author Biography
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 Attaché 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.
Number of Pages: 320
Dimensions: 1.1 x 8.9 x 5.9 IN
Publication Date: May 21, 2024
