Kiss the Eyes of Peace
“Šalamun’s poems don’t unfold, they erupt with the volcanic energy of tumultuous times, both personal and historical.”—MARY RUEFLE
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, Tomaž Šalamun’s work offers a singularly thrilling reading experience. Sharp and subtle, Šalamun’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 Šalamun. 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,” Šalamun’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 Šalamun’s storied career.
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Tomaž Šalamun
Tomaž Šalamun 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.
Ilya Kaminsky
Ilya Kaminsky is the author of Dancing In Odessa and Deaf Republic. He is also the translator and editor of many other books, including Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, and Ecco Anthology of International Poetry.
Brian Henry
Brian Henry is the translator of Tomaž Šalamun’s Kiss the Eyes of Peace and Woods and Chalices, as well as Aleš Debeljak’s Smugglers and six books by Aleš Šteger, most recently Burning Tongues: New and Selected Poems.
Praise and Prizes
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