Inspired by Rimbaud and Ashbery, the Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun is now inspiring the younger generation of American poets and Woods and Chalices will secure his place in the ranks of influential, experimental twenty-first-century writers. alamun s strengths are on display here: innocence and obscenity, closely allied; a great historical reach; and questions, commands, and statements of identity that challenge all norms and yet seem uncannily familiar and right I m molasses, don t forget that. Coat of Arms. The wet sun stands on dark bricks. Through the king s mouth we see teeth. He sews lips. The owl moves its head. She s tired, drowsy and black. She doesn t glow in gold like she d have to.
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From Publishers Weekly
Slovenian poet Salamun (The Book for My Brother) has become an influence, and a mentor, for plenty of young American poets. One reason lies in Salamun's postmodern mix of giddy and global with the earthy retrospect he takes from his homeland. Salamun (now a visiting professor, with associate professor Henry, at the University of Richmond) makes his new collection a whirlwind tour of sites and moods, naming locales from Persia to the Grajena River to the Pacific coast and riffing on the work of other poets from Walt Whitman to Mark Levine. Unrhymed sonnets and choppy stanzaic poems shuffle and deal among postsurrealist images, violent memories, sexual dreams: Crystals are bedsprings, they have noddles/ in their robberies, the poet decides in Odessa, while In the Tent Among Grapes begins: Don't sneak me onto mountains, chicken. Don't verify/ your neighbor. You creep on my vaults. The next-to-last, and most coherent, piece, New York–Montreal Train, 24 January 1974, seems to recall a visionary experience from the poet's own life: this record of a brush with bizarre immanence (as if someone were dragging me/ through milk) may help readers new to Salamun trust the disorientation to be found in much of his work. (Apr.)
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
The American closest in style to the prolific Slovenian poet Salamun is John Ashbery, which tells those unfamiliar with Salamun pretty much what they need to know. Most of his poems are wildly jangling compendiums of images and statements whose associative relationships are obscure to the point of seeming nonexistent or aleatory, pulled out of a hat. True, there’s a music being played here—distinct rhythms, a consistently dreamlike quality, a contrapuntal balance of acerbic humor and amorphous dread—but it’s like the twelve-tone music of Schoenberg, without themes, variations, development, or other such frills. One thing gives way, rather than leads, to the next. And then, as in Ashbery, there are the occasional moments of coherence, when Salamun manages or deigns to make “sense,” and you get comparatively lucid, intuitively right statements such as “My poems are genitalia.” These are the moments you live for; otherwise, you float along the poet’s twisting stream, not knowing or caring where you are, where you’re going or where you’ve been. --Kevin Nance
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1.0 out of 5 stars
What do I care, or Big in Ljubljana,
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This review is from: Woods and Chalices (Hardcover)
We have this English word dotty. 'The boy scrubs the kitchen and crushes/the dot to mom' or from Row (2006) 'Is god dotted?' Though actually that has a certain ring to it.The first 10 pages are mostly stodgy sonnnets; even the sytax is dull, the verb-forms monotonous. As to meaning, he gives a whole new meaning to the word 'meaning'. Then things perk up for a couple pages before darkness descends again; 'sombrer', the French would call it. Would a chronology help? One gets the feeling books like this and the earlier Row are being pumped out like product, to ride a wave; but the new Vasco Popa he's not - obscurity's moved on a ways since then. When the NY Schoolers write this way you feel they're revealing themselves; their pose is (at least sometimes) genuine - where, though, is Salamun? Maybe he's funnier in Slovenian. Maybe Gertrude Stein is, too
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