Feast: Contemporary Avant-Garde Poetry—Blasphemous and Religious, Tragic and Visionary

by Tomaž Šalamun

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).

Genres: Poetry

126 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 23, 2000

About the author

Tomaž Šalamun was a Slovenian poet, who has had books translated into most of the European languages. He lived in Ljubljana and occasionally teaches in the USA. His recent books in English are The Book for My Brother, Row, and Woods and Chalices.

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Partisans of genre, the hoops around
the grain of sand were always made of steel.
Angels, a waterfall, and ruins serve
the bigger, stronger hordes that killed,

celebrating now the deaths of the enemy.
Shall I strip off Rome, a bulk that with a
transfer of weight into atoms implored
beyond its circumferance, and then dispersed

itself in hateful autonomies, the decadent
burned out field, myth-hungry? I had
to cross the ocean by myself and

ultimately step into: who dies in
May is black as a silky elder tree.
The stars will splash like anthems.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tomaz Salamun read at Posman's Books across from the New York University mews and I gave him one of my drawings I used to work on during poetry readings there, I was that touched by his poetry. What a refined and haunting sensibility.

[Dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I know I know not another polish poem, Salamun seems to have pulled the rug out and beat it and smelled the cat shit and it doesn't have to be so you know so tragic and its bad enough to be a person I guess or at least that's what he'd have us know.

[Octavio Solis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am thrilled to be reading this difficult book of verse and feel like I actually get the pomes. They are playfully surreal and make dissociative connections that accumulate into a stark statement on the human condition. They breathe in the fumes of the poet's laboratory.

[Ryan Dilbert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes absurd, sometimes bizarre, always some bad ass modern poetry. I smell horses in Poland too, Tomaz. I hear ya.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 5 out of 5]

Difficult and sublime.

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved this collection. In particular the poem "Gaza" and the little intermissions sprinkled throughout.

[Donald Armfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can't say I understand half of what I read. but some of Salamun's lines are fantastic.

From a surrealistic to mythology he does poetry like it seeps out his veins and on to paper.

-Waterfall
-Dinner before Departure
-Letter to Artaud
-Moss
-Jonah
-War
-For Jakov Brdar
-My Glass, My Flour
-To give a Scalp
-The Trap

Just to name a few I like. Three Wise Cannibals had to be the best. more of flash fiction than poetry.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

freak...