Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun died on December 27. He was 73 and lived in Ljubljana. Born in Zagreb, Croatia, he authored over three-dozen poetry collections, many of which have been translated into more than twenty languages. Poker, his first book, was published in 1966 when he was just twenty-five years old.

Salamun’s work was influenced by the likes of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Charles Simic, and Charles Baudelaire, and it involves elements of surrealism. Simic edited The Selected Poems of Tomaž Šalamun from Ecco’s Modern European Poetry Series, published in 1988.

“Tomaž Šalamun was in fact a gift from the gods, a soft-spoken man blessed with the gentlest soul, and this gift, his poems, will keep on giving for a very long time,” wrote Christopher Merrill, Director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, in an obituary in the Huffington Post. “They will survive.”

To learn more about Tomaž Šalamun’s life, read his bio at the Poetry Foundation’s website.