Feast: Poems [Hardcover]

Tomaz Salamun (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 23, 2000

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).

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

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.DDaniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, IL
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 112 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (October 23, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151005605
• ISBN-13: 978-0151005604
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,024,589 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Tribal Art, October 18, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Feast: Poems (Hardcover)

A slow beginning to the book, and to some degree, it rings with that American, competitive, referential, historo-hype you get from great foreign writers who, all of the sudden, find themselves in Radio City Poetry Hall because the academy-entrenched poets feel obliged/committed to placing medals on them and getting them BIGHOUSE publications for their profound simplicity and historical signifincance despite whether or not they truly beleive in them and their art. Salamun is a tribal artist, the only kind of artist, and I know that what I instinctually feel is missing from half the poems is his inability to take greater risks, to do what he does best--- to leave the world of poetry in its mess of political debris and sing without question the mystery of objectivity and the beauty of discovering the self without self consciousness. His tribe is growing...smaller or larger makes no difference.

Still, Feast is much better than 98% of what we find in the bighouse.

"I", "Bosporus", and "I Smell Horses in Poland" is where he's really present. Don't hesitate in deciding about the book for; "Whoever eats from the Tree of Life loses all his sins"(p.9)

4.0 out of 5 stars "The wound will be a fabulous pool.", July 2, 2008

By 

dada duck! (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Feast: Poems (Hardcover)

I have no idea what a prior reviewer is referring to when he talks about Salamun finding himself in "Radio City Poetry Hall," or the "BIGHOUSE" (seems the reviewer is caught in his own "referential historo-hype"). Anyway, this is a very satisfying book...for a certain kind of reader.

If you like your poems rational, if you like them unified, if you like or require a coherant voice, elegant arguments, recognizable poetic conventions, traditional tropes, a story or backstory, then you may find yourself frustrated.

Salamun draws from a range of avante-garde traditions (including Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Artaud, the Surrealists, Russian Futurism, Frank O'Hara and the New York School) whose thrust is splitting up the unified poem into shining bits, (sort of like how a mirror is less useful but far more interesting after a baseball is thrown into it).

His poems tend to advance via disconnected or surreally connected images, associative lists, absurd questions and propositions, and an almost arbitrary jotting of events and mental ephemera; some examples:

"Artaud was throwing up, Artaud was killing / himself. I'd like to dance in the disco again."

"On that white paper. Are there / no traces of saliva? Does nothing take leave, / does nothing die? No traces of sea froth?"

"Muzzles kept // falling around thighs like foxes. They solidified / into ceramics. Ceramics are the eyes of cathedrals. Under / the foot of every elephant is an eye. The eye is harder // than the fan. The pheasant covers your // eyes. Its chest is a thick plank.'

"In the heart a bullet, in the bullet an ape, / in the ape a plant, in the plant a mirror."

The delight (my delight at any rate) in reading Salamun is the sudden, often jarring, turns of image and tone and perception, the constantly and elusively changing thought process, the madcap unreliability of the speaker, and the profound terrible and intimate moments that such a speaker can take us to:

"Yesterday was / a midsummer day. A friend's child / died before being born."

"As I walk the town / I notice every prey about to ripen."

"Little hen pigeons are still, / you keep them safe by breathing."

"A field of hounds, of emperors / on horseback, of drowning deer."