The Book for My Brother Tomaz Salamun
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The Book for My Brother
Tomaz Salamun
Harvest Books
Paperback
108 pages
April 2006
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The Croatian-born, Slovenian-raised Salamun has published more than thirty books of poetry. His work is raw, gritty and in your face. The biggest surprise, perhaps, is that Salamun also has a sense of humor about things too. In The Book for my Brother, Tomaz tackles the big questions:
- He takes on God. "To be God is first class/Those who don't know me by heart will be erased." (The circle and The Circle's Argument)
- He takes on himself as a young man. "O how I call the body of my younger/self, I would like to hug him." (The Letter)
- He takes on teaching. "Students are my grapes. I make wine from them." (Kashogi).
- He takes on the essence of the soul. "A man's soul spills out of him from the day of his birth/like wine from a bottle of a drunkard who can no longer/find his mouth." (Robi)
- He takes on language. "Language is the savior of love, of flowers,/of mankind and the instrument of God himself."
- He takes on the faith of men and saints. "Saints have always been annihilated in strange ways. Man has always licked his lips because of God." (Ring the Bell)
There is no topic that Salamun doesn't address, no question left unanswered. Salamun, who makes his home in Ljubljana, Slovenia, with his wife, the painter Metka Krasovec, is a true poetic genius. He is fearless and brilliant, devouring language and regurgitating it back to us like a mother bird feeding her babies. He strips the incomprhensible to its root so that we may begin to understand. He constructs new worlds and destroys our perceptions of reality. Salamun is a poet for the masses, but a true poet's poet who loves to write poetry because "The writing/of poetry is/the most/serious/deed in the/world." (The Writing)
The Book for My Brother is Salamun's gift to all of us. It is a legacy of intelligence and understanding. This book is a must-have for any lover of language and/or poetry. It is truly exquisite.
Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Deanna Goodson, 2006
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