To read Tomas Salamun 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). from dusk jacket


Tomaz Salamun, widely recognized as one of the leading Central European poets, is the author of more than thirty collections of poetry, and has had books translated into most of the European languages.


Tomaž Šalamun was born in 1941 in Zagreb, but grew up in Koper, a coastal town in Slovenia south of Trieste. In 1966 he graduated in Art History from Ljubljana University. Šalamun, who won the Prešeren Prize in 2000, was the leading figure of the Slovenian poetic avant-garde in the 1960s and in the 1970s. In early 1970s he spent two years at Iowa on the International Writing Programme, and he has lived on and off in the US since then. In 1996 he became Slovenian Cultural Ataché in New York. He has published 34 volumes of poetry in Slovenian.