Brian Henry’s Kiss the Eyes of Peace (2024) is a Herculean translation project, a selection of poems by the great Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun, whose witty, energetic, and innovative lines come to life under Henry’s deft touch. The collection, a finalist for the 2025 Griffin Prize, is another entry into Henry’s ever-growing oeuvre of both translation and poetry. While Brian Henry, the translator, is a subtle figure, allowing the poems he carries into English to shine, Brian Henry, the poet, is a whirlwind. His poems can be charming, contemplative, harrowing, or anywhere in between. Through his eyes, readers will reexamine the modern world, in all its beauty and unbearable disorder. His pieces carry a sonic beauty that unfolds across lines and stanzas, a subtle artistry that makes even the most banal of moments burst with gravitas. To you or me, a river is just a river. To Brian Henry, a river is a site of infinite possibility. That is thevision which animates Kiss the Eyes of Peace, 2015’s Static & Snow, 2020’s Permanent State, and any other project which Henry chooses to undertake, and it’s that vision which cements him as one of the English language’s most exciting translators and poets.

 

 

​Will Sheets: You’ve spent your career not only as a poet but as an award-winning translator. You’ve helped bring the work of many brilliant poets before an English-speaking audience and allowed their poems to live a new life in the English language. You’ve translated the work of many diverse poets across your career, but you seem to have focused much of your energy on Slovenian poets, publishing six books by the legendary Aleš Šteger, including the 2022 collection Burning Tongues: New and Selected Poems, Aleš Debeljak’s Smugglers, and two books by Tomaž Šalamun, most recently the Griffin Prize shortlisted Kiss the Eyes of Peace, a volume of selected poems spanning 50 years of Šalamun’s fascinating career. You’ve spoken about your relationship with Slovenian poetry before, in an interview with Blackbird.

 

How do you see Slovenian poetry evolving and influencing other poetic traditions, including modern English language poetry? How would you encourage interested readers to go about discovering the rich culture of Slovenian poetry?

 

Brian Henry: I would encourage readers to start with Tomaž Šalamun, of course, and then to go back to Edvard Kocbek and Srečko Kosovel, both of whom have substantial, well-translated, well-edited books in English. My favorite single volume by Debeljak is The City and the Child, but I’d start with Without Anesthesia: New and Selected Poems. I’d also recommend Miklavž Komelj’s forthcoming Selected Poems translated by Dan Rosenberg. Small presses are generally the best place to find Slovenian poetry in English—presses like Black Ocean, Tavern Books, Ugly Duckling Presse, White Pine Press, Zephyr Press, and, in England, Arc Publications.

 

I think Šalamun has influenced English-language poetry ever since Ecco published his Selected Poems in 1988. That book, and the others that followed, along with his frequent presence in the United States to give readings and to teach as a visiting poet, as well as his friendships with several generations of American poets, have had a substantial impact on American poetry.

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WS: Your most recent translation, Kiss the Eyes of Peace, a selection of poems by Tomaž Šalamun from 1964 to 2014, has garnered national and international recognition and acclaim, reaching the shortlist for the 2025 Griffin Prize, and being described by Slovenian poet Aleš Šteger as a book which will “revolutionize the way Tomaž Šalamun is perceived by English readers.” You’ve spoken about your relationship with Šalamun in the past, both as a translator and as a friend, saying that encountering his work was “mind-altering.” I can imagine this new collection presented an opportunity for a new relationship with Šalamun’s work, not just as a translator but as a curator. What was the process of forming this new relationship like, and how has it changed the way you think about Šalamun’s work?

 

BH: Seeing all of his published work in the original books was awe-inspiring. He published 52 books in Slovenia. I’d already owned a few of them, but going through his body of work, book by book, made me realize that he was an even greater, more capacious poet than I’d thought.

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WS: Not only are you a brilliant translator, but a brilliant poet as well. Your two most recent collections, 2015’s Static & Snow and 2020’s Permanent State, are both powerful explorations of form and possess a quiet brevity that only heightens the riveting language of your poetry. Static & Snow is an examination of winter and how it imposes on our senses, bringing to life the bitter cold of the wind and the almost imperceptible sound of the flurries it carries. But although this collection is very much concerned with winter, you seem to gravitate toward the symbol of the river in many of the poems in this collection. This symbol materializes in the first lines of the book:

 

The river’s candle

clipped by the footbridge

that pins the rockedge,

an island of water

patient to rejoin

what surrounds it.

 

It appears again in many of the following poems, “River River,” River Bottom,” “Bright Inviting,” and “Brittle Travel,” to name a few. How did you situate this symbol within the world of this collection? Is the moving water a rebellion against winter, as in “River Crossing,” where the water is:

 

            too wide to freeze

            or span, to cross you must

            swim, the current a visible

            instance of movement

 

or does the river carry a different meaning for you in these poems?

 

BH: Bodies of water have featured in my poetry since the beginning, but rivers (and riverbanks) have been especially important to my work since I started writing. One of the first poems I wrote was in response to the image of Laura Palmer on the riverbank in Twin Peaks. And as a teenager, I was obsessed with the movie River’s Edge. Something about corpses on riverbanks appealed to my sensibility, I guess. In the ghazal in my first book, Astronaut, I mention the Flint River flood that brought hundreds of coffins out of the ground; and in that book, there’s a poem called “Winter” that takes place on the Yarra River in Melbourne and another that takes place at a small river in New Hampshire that would freeze and flood. My book Graft combines two very different landscapes—Australia and New Hampshire—since I moved straight from Melbourne to Plymouth, NH, and the winter landscape really comes to the fore in Static & Snow.

 

Almost all of the rivers in my poems (except for the one in Quarantine, which takes place in an imagined landscape) are real. In “Bright Inviting,” I’m looking at the Contoocook River in New Hampshire in the winter. I used to go there twice a year, and I’d swim in the river during the summer and marvel at it in the winter. And since I always wrote a lot when I was there, that landscape enters many of the poems. And since I’m drawn to rivers, I tend to write about them—or at least include them in my poems—whenever I go anywhere.

 

Beyond the actual, I am interested in the river as an illustration of Heraclitean flux, and in the (physical as well as philosophical) relationship between a river and a riverbank, and in what happens when a human is placed there.

 

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WS: The emptiness of winter is a much-discussed feature of the season, where snow turns everything white and indistinguishable. In Static & Snow, you reinvent this idea, not reviling the sameness of winter views, but rejoicing in the views themselves. The vistas of Static & Snow draw life from the white expanses of winter in poems like “What Vista,” “No Fishing,” “First Snow,” and “Winter Pasture.” You write in “Winter Songs” that:

 

There is so much more sky

now. So much more gray

in the sky now. More 

pain in the sky now.

 

It’s a moment of beauty that matches the frankness of the season it's depicting. What about these winter vistas spoke to you when you were working on this collection, and how did you draw from them something more than a formless field of snow? 

 

BH: I’ve always been drawn to landscape and to what can happen in a poem when I insert myself—or the speaker of a poem—into it as an observer/participant. Having grown up in Virginia, I’m also drawn to extremes in weather—or what someone from Virginia would consider extremes. And as I mentioned earlier, I used to live in New Hampshire and, later, visit there every winter, and I always made sure to write while I was there.

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Both Static & Snow and Permanent State, the book which follows it, eschew the traditional partitions that often appear in poetry collections, letting the reader experience your work in a continuous flow. Instead, many of the poems across these books are split into parts themselves, such as “Winter Static” and “Moth Ark” in Static & Snow or “West Telluride” and “Glass Corona” in Permanent State. What appeals to you about separating your poems into parts, and why do you think you gravitate towards this on a single poem scale rather than at the level of an entire book?

 

I’ve always been drawn to poetic sequences and series. I expect it started with my education in modernist and postmodernist poetries, but I quite like assembling longer poems from smaller lyric parts. My book The Stripping Point consists of two long sequences, one of which is essentially a collage, and my books Quarantine and Doppelgänger are book-length poems composed of many smaller parts. I think it’s because the writing of the poems allows me to focus on a tiny canvas—on language and sound and image and emotion—but putting together a book allows me to consider the bigger picture—the movements and juxtapositions made possible during the editing process. The shorter poems in parts, like “West Telluride,” are meant to be kaleidoscopic lyric poems, where each part provides a different angle on the poem’s ostensible subject.

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WS: Your 2020 collection Permanent State contains an equal measure of far-flung imagination, like in “Presidential Water”:

 

The surface of Eris is sentient. And then there’s the inner belt.

Vegan mice eat vegan cheese. One tick at a time, Hannah Van 

Buren was no wastrel. A deer has scraped a clean hole by the

begonias.

 

and a concise meditation on your immediate life and environs. In many ways, this collection harkens back to its title in that it is in a permanent state of impermanence. In the first poem in the collection, “Wilderness Version,” you write that:

 

I slipped inside

one person,

staggered out another.

 

Whether you are tearing apart a house in “Spring Clean” or observing a figure “caught between/ train cars" in “Saint Soul,” it feels like you and your poems are constantly changing and evolving through this collection. Could you speak a little about how this idea of impermanence impacted the process of writing these poems and crafting this collection?

 

BH: Because Static & Snow was relatively focused, I wanted my next book to be more varied. There are a lot of poems that I liked but omitted from Static & Snow because they didn’t “fit,” so I held onto them and built a new book around them. Permanent State also includes poems that emerged from homeschooling my children, from living in a house with a backyard, from traveling, from the news, from illness, and so on: basically, from life, which is, of course, impermanent.

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WS: In Permanent State, you intersperse short, one- to two-line poems between other pieces of a more traditional length. These pieces are quick-hitting aphorisms (“Small Talk,” “For Rent”), portraits of a single instant, such as “Push Mower”:

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            The tangled bank 

            pulls, you

            lean.

 

or thoughts made all the more impactful by their frankness (“Pissing Blood” “Disaster Relief”). What was the process of writing these short pieces like, and did that experience differ, if at all, from how you wrote the collection’s other poems? How did these short pieces help shape the collection?

 

BH: I’ve always loved really short poems that hit you immediately, or a moment later, or not at all. I’ve been writing them for a long time, but Permanent State features them more prominently than any of my other books. They’re like little rest stops between the longer poems. The inspirations for those little poems are various. “Push Mower,” for example, came to life when I was mowing grass on the bank of a drainage ditch and suddenly thought of Darwin’s “It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank.” Sometimes I think they’re the beginning of a poem, but then realize they are the poem.​​​

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