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Burning Tongues | Bloodaxe Books
ales-steger-burning-tongues

Aleš Šteger

Burning Tongues

New & Selected Poems

Aleš Šteger

TRANSLATED BY BRIAN HENRY

Publication Date : 14 Nov 2022

ISBN: 9781780376257

Pages: 65
Size :216 x 138mm
Rights: World

Aleš Šteger was born in 1973 in Ptuj, Slovenia, where he grew up, then part of the former Yugoslavia ruled by Tito, which gained its independence when he was 18. He published his first collection in 1995 at the age of 22, and was immediately recognised as a key voice in the new generation of post-Communist poets not only in Slovenia but throughout central Europe.

Notable for its moral engagement, Šteger’s poetry is acutely precise in its observation and concentration as well as multi-layered and technically versatile, ingenious and inventive, adventurous and playful yet serious in intention. Above all, his poems are incessantly curious in their investigations which the reader is invited to share – and he loves to ambush the reader with the unexpected.

His influences are mainly European, including the Serbian master poet Vasko Popa, as well as German and Spanish-language poets he has translated into Slovenian, such as Bachmann, Benn, Huchel, Neruda and Vallejo. He has added his own strand of writing to the distinctively European genre of prose poems in pieces which describe everyday objects in minute terms, only to explode in the imagination through what he perceives in them. He is also known for his prose books and experimental writing including his Written on Site pieces.

‘For anyone interested in the state of Europe, Aleš Šteger’s Burning Tongues is an indispensable read. Widely travelled, Šteger is among the continent’s most important mid-generation poets, a stylish Central European culture-maker, by turn playwright, editor, festival director, visual artist and cultural ambassador. He writes with peculiarly Slovenian playfulness about contemporary society and sensibility: the hyper-reality of his work fizzes with zeitgeist. This substantial volume is easy to read and beautifully translated.’ – Fiona Sampson, The Tablet (Summer Reading)

‘Collection of poems by Slovenia’s leading poet and a leading voice in the new generation of post-Communist poets from central Europe. Šteger will be a keynote speaker for Slovenia at the 2023 Frankfurt Book Fair.’ - Caroline Sanderson, New Titles: Non-fiction, November 2022, The Bookseller, on Burning Tongues: New & Selected Poems

'This selection of poems from six collections covers the years 1995 to 2020, with an additional six new pieces... Inventive and highly original in conception and execution: open at random and marvel.' - Frank Startup, The School Librarian, on Burning Tongues: New & Selected Poems

'Each one of his books is an extraordinary event.' – Durs Grünbein

‘Aleš Šteger is a poet of the mutable world, “emptied of solidity”, writing “between/ The time of the word/ And the time/ When/ A word/Is devoured”. Emerging in the aftermath of the wars that broke former Yugoslavia into many countries, Šteger has become one of the most significant European poets of the new century. In his hands it is as if poetry were giving up its last secrets, “when books don’t open to speak but to whisper”, and metaphors are “instantly dispersed by a galactic wind". His language slips through fissures of time and space, where, for example, “Hayden plays his saxophone in the Hotel Europa Regina” and all manner of ordinary things become objects of cosmic wonderment: bread and knives, shoes, seahorses, toothpicks, earrings and paperclips. We are fortunate to have these selections from five of his books and also new poems, translated beautifully by Brian Henry. More than a new Selected, this is a gift to the English language and a bridge between worlds.’ – Carolyn Forché

'And what if, just as you open one of those rare, thrilling books in which a terrific foreign poet is carried into English by a terrific poet-translator, the poets tell you, “You have five minutes / Until I turn out the lights.” Better get going, reader. In this long-awaited Selected Poems, Aleš Šteger imagines the poet (which is to say, you, everyone) as a figure of disappearance, slipping through cracks, stepping through two doors at once, turning into quotation, becoming a word, vanishing into a wood, finding a world in which objects – a walnut, an egg, shoes – are awake and looking back, drawing, maybe dragging the poet into a drama that we suddenly see has always been shared. Just so, in a Šteger poem, a piece of meat stuck between the teeth can be linked to revolution and “Whoever thinks hope misses it.” Although Šteger’s poems have that lightness about them that Italo Calvino so admired, they can be, you’ll soon see, devastating. Šteger’s work has earned a huge international audience so that while you’ve been reading this little paragraph, this book has gone into yet another edition.' – Forrest Gander

 

Praise for Above the Sky Beneath the Earth (2019):

‘Aleš Šteger is the real thing! He is the poet of inimitable gifts! He is one of the best Eastern European poets of his generation! It is the truth: Šteger is a marvelous voice, one that takes some of the playfulness of his Yugoslavian compatriots Vasko Popa and Tomaž Šalamun to the whole new level. What is that level? It’s Šteger’s very own kind of wisdom: "Between truth and man / I choose waiting.” What is the source of this wisdom? “I got stuck in silence,” the poet says, “therefore I write.” To which one might add: he knows loss, therefore his poems are beautiful. In these remarkable translations by Brian Henry we are lucky enough to behold in English the work of this major Slovenian voice.’ – Ilya Kaminsky

'The playfulness of Aleš Šteger’s Above the Sky Beneath the Earth is contagious.' – Valzhyna Mort, Poetry

 

Aleš Šteger reading at Newcastle Poetry Festival, Saturday 4 May 2019

 

Ireland & EU: Click here to order from Books Upstairs in Dublin

  

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Aleš Šteger Readings

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Aleš Šteger's joint online launch of his retrospective Burning Tongues is available on our YouTube channel. Summer 2023 Reading choice in The Tablet.

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This live-streamed launch reading by Philip Gross and Aleš Šteger is now available to watch online.

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