Feast

By turns brutal and coy, gnomic and blunt, the Slovenian poet Salamun's third English-language collection insistently dismembers the world, only to slyly recreate and celebrate it. Edited by Charles Simic, this volume presents translations of Salamun's recent and older work, as did 1997's The Four Questions of Melancholy and 1988's Selected Poems, the latter also edited by Simic. Uneven and variegated, Feast presents everything from throwaway one-liners to beautifully muted lyrics and wildly excessive, surreal investigations of daily life. Salamun excels when working in the last mode, and the strongest poems here offer a Whitmanic breadth steeped in an absurdity that is caustic yet humane: ""A windowpane yields no warmth. Who// made it transparent? Who owns the energy/ nibbling under the teeth? Have you ever spilled/ a bucket in the desert? Like throwing snow to the hens."" Though Salamun's approach varies, the poems frequently have recourse to fantastic questions, using the interrogative mode to aggressively probe ancient philosophical conundrums about form and matter, perception and reality. They lead not to reductive, systematically organized knowledge, but to reveries on the poet's ability to remake experience in a world that is endlessly destructive: ""I felt blood under your chopping block. The doe turns/ into a bird and takes flight. It's heavy. It barely/ gets off the ground. Branches rub the belly of the doe."" While Feast is rife with powerful transformations, Salamun's relentless pursuit of metaphor can lead to tiresome shaggy dog stories, and many poems contain both magical and infantile moments. But the best poems here simultaneously pursue and violently undermine knowledge (""...the enemy, logic and elegance, the beaten track/ of the perfect instrument. You have to crush it..."") to create a fierce, intelligent lyricism. (Oct.)