FEAST

Šalamun is Slovenia’s foremost living poet and the budding nation's former consul in New York. He is a wry fantasist with the surrealist gift for striking and unlikely juxtapositions, his best work shows flashes of a sardonic, almost caustic wit. Many of the 65 poems here threaten to turn into lengthy catalogues of non sequiturs, but Šalamun's sure metrical grasp and deft manipulation of line breaks and stanza forms keep them moving forward, often in a headlong plunge of cracked metaphors and hermetic images. The less cryptic poems, such as "Dolmen" and "Jonah," have a stark, bittersweet power. In their accumulation of images of violence and ominous observations like "Human lives are fluff," several of the poems obliquely acknowledge the turmoil in the former Republic of Yugoslavia (a turmoil that Slovenia has been happily spared). But for the most part, the work here is more obscure but clever enough to warrant re-reading. At his worst, Šalamun is difficult and esoteric to the point of opaqueness, with lines like "There are demolished stones in the tub when the sky is stretched," but in the same poem one can find metaphors of stark lucidity: "The castle has a terrible face." The translations, most of them by the poet himself with either Christopher Merrill or Phyllis Levin, are deft. One wishes that the poems were dated somewhere, as Simic has apparently drawn from all of Šalamun's career output in this volume.

As an introduction to a powerful contemporary voice, this is a useful collection.