Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Slovenian by Barbara Siegel Carlson and Ana Jelnikar. LOOK BACK, LOOK AHEAD is the first American edition of Kosovel's selected poetry. "To read him is like watching Van Gogh's last paintings, to stare at Celan's last drops of life. And yet, he's the threshold, the triumphal arch to this small nation's destiny, the eternal poet of the total existence"—Tomaž Šalamun.

Author City: Ljubluana SLV

Srečko Kosovel (1904-1926) was born near Trieste and was raised in the Karst, a desolate region of rockwork in Slovenia, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Following the outbreak of World War I, his parents sent him to school in Ljubljana, where he began to write, experimenting with a wide variety of styles—impressionist, symbolist, expressionist, futurist, Dada, and surrealist. He studied at the University of Ljubljana, became active in the literary world and founded a literary review (Beautiful Vida). In 1925 he prepared a manuscript for publication called The Golden Boat, alluding to the Bengali poet Rabindranth Tagore, but it was subsequently lost and never published in its original form. In 1926 he died of meningitis at the age of 22, leaving over 1000 poems as well as prose writings, essays and vignettes totaling several hundred pages. Kosovel's poetry has been translated into several languages including French, Italian, German, Russian, Czech, Croatian, Serbian and Catalan. An early modernist, he is considered one of Slovenia's foremost poets of the 20th century.

Reviews and Other Links
Larry O. Dean in New Pages
Brian Henry in The Best American Poetry
Amy Groshek @ Rain Taxi
Joseph Goosey @ The Quarterly Conversation
Peter Moysaenko @ BOMBLOG