Kiss the Eyes of Peace: Selected Poems, 19642014

Tomaž Šalamun's Kiss the Eyes of Peace is a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and a significant work of postwar European poetry. It offers a thrilling reading experience with rhythms intertwining with an incantatory force, prescient, liberatory politics, and poetics. The histories of Slovenia, the former Yugoslavia, and Europe are broken into kaleidoscopic harmonies of terror and joy, with friends and family talking to each other under the sun as snow, apples, and deer mingle with blood and bones, salt and cabbage, gold, silk, and wine, and with God and heaven in the sand and grass. Šalamun's oracular poems are moving and eerie, offering peace in the wildness and wilderness of his art.

Format: Hardback
Length: 264 pages
Publication date: 04 July 2024
Publisher: Milkweed Editions

Tomaž Šalamun, a renowned poet of the twentieth century, is a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. His work, which is widely regarded as some of the most important and innovative poetry from postwar Europe, offers a singularly thrilling reading experience. Šalamun's rhythms intertwine with an incantatory force, and his prescient, liberatory politics and poetics pulse like a heartbeat. In his collection 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, salt and cabbage, gold, silk, and wine, and with God and heaven in the sand and grass. Šalamun's 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.

Weight: 488g
Dimension: 228 x 157 x 22 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781639550401