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Tomaz Salamun was born in Zagreb, Croatia, raised in Koper, Slovenia,
and now makes his home in Ljubljana. He studied art history and worked
as a curator and a conceptual artist before turning to the written word.
Having published 25 volumes of poems in his native Slovenia, Salamun
has received many prizes in Europe and been translated into nearly a
dozen languages.
The Selected Poems Of Tomaz Salamun, edited and in large part translated
by Charles Simic, was the poet's debut collection in English, brought out in
1988 as part of Ecco Press's prestigious Modern European Poetry series. It was
followed by The Shepherd, The Hunter (1992), translated by Sonja Kravanja,
and The Four Questions Of Melancholy (White Pine Press, 1997); this greatly
expanded collection of some 200 poems was edited by Christopher Merrill, another
of Salamun's poet-translators. Feast, his fourth volume in English, is
due out from Harcourt Brace this year.
Salamun has won exuberant praise from many American poets, including James Tate,
Robert Creeley, Robert Hass, who celebrates his "love of the poetics of rebellion," and
Jorie Graham, who calls his work "one of Europe's great philosophical wonders."
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