Inpress Newsletter
Click below to read an extract (Adobe Acrobat Reader required)
Synopsis
Winner of the inaugural Jane Martin Prize for Poetry. ...and I watch the oxidised stations go by slowly dozing to the sound of the fine talk in a cradle of soft sentences...through the window I spot two storks over the lake, two forgotten orthographic signs I could not read anymore written in the reeds wings open...and I notice another one and two or three more; the entire country covered with copper-beaked white storks. The well-known Babel myth provides the backbone for the first cycle of poems and a departure point for further journeys in this, Lehoczky’s first book in English. Budapest to Babel is a rewarding and focussed exploration of the difficulties and joys of encountering and engaging fully with a new language. States of confusion and chaos, playfulness and joy are all explored throughout this lively and rewarding debut. Agnes Lehoczky was born in 1976 in Budapest. Station X (2000) and Medalion (2002), her first two short collections, were published in Budapest by Universitas. Her work has been published in a number of places in print and online in Hungary and the UK. "It is rare to find such articulate poems about inarticulacy; poems that comprehend inarticulacy in their composition and which are, for my money, very moving … an original writer with something original to say." — George Szirtes "Agnes Lehoczky draws on the poetic tradition of making language the subject of the image but complicates this intriguingly by being in two places at once; she makes herself both actor and acted upon in enjoyable strategies of investment and displacement." — Lavinia Greenlaw
Prose poetry is often regarded with suspicion by English readers, who are apt to find it challenging and then hide behind an argument as to whether or not it is poetry. It removes any expectation of line length and rhythm; in fact, all comfortable expectation.However, by page 11 of Ágnes Lehóczky's Budapest to Babel, any prejudice dissolves in the poem's persistent and driving pulse. I finished the first page without realising that there was no punctuation. It reads beautifully with neither comma nor capital.Geography is a theme that flows through the book (like the rivers which might be Thames or Danube). Whether London, Budapest or Wales, there is a sense of dislocation. The poet is in one place - not necessarily specified - and thinking or speaking of another.Lehóczky, not having imbibed English with mother's milk, is free to treat the language with the relish and the playfulness of a small child who has been given a new set of bricks. The results are often unexpected, for example 'In the cleft palate of the elongated street.' or, 'spoken in the liquefaction of air.' Liquefaction, always a word always associated with Herrick's 'Upon Julia's Clothes', here assumes other possibilities, a link, perhaps, to a mundane industrial process. The book is full acute moments of observation and phrases which stick in the mind, and surely one of the criteria of poetry is that it should be memorable. There is much here to remember; it is a book that demands repeated reading.
Simon Rees-Roberts
Have you read Budapest to Babel by Agnes Lehoczky? - Add your own review
