Druids

The poetry of the late Slovenian poet Šalamun (1941–2014) proves joyfully irreverent in this collection that defamiliarizes the everyday. In Kravanja’s attentive translation, Šalamun’s terse, expertly crafted lines create “dark incisions” into a world readers thought they knew. “I’m placed in God with all my flesh./ Food in a pan, the people’s food./ I flow out, on all sides, like a river/ and people tell me they wash their/ souls in me,” he writes. By exploiting the tension between the seen and unseen, the known and the unknowable, Šalamun destabilizes commonly held beliefs about the order of things: “Order, according to cosmic dawns.” This obsession with logic and causation—and his idiosyncratic ways of conceiving them—manifests both in the poems’ style and content. This volume is gracefully unified by its commitment to enjambment as a way of rendering familiar narratives suddenly and wonderfully strange. As the book unfolds, the work is increasingly inhabited by silence, which amplifies the surreal and often disconcerting moments in each intricately imagined dreamscape. Šalamun provocatively places the line in tension with the sentence, allowing suspense to accumulate and undermining expectations of narrative resolution. Šalamun’s poems are as subversive in their craft as they are in their thinking, and this translation preserves that originality of thought and expression. (Jan.)