Druids

He draws,
with his shoulder,
in the air
a fox,
unknowingly. With his senses

he swings the tray’s
handle, pauses,
sways

and arranges
himself as glitter, a net,
knowingly.

I saw you in a black sweater.
You were guzzling black golden wads of cotton.

 

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. —Publishers Weekly, starred review