Synopsis
Address unknown Mother, they are killing each other, Death is everywhere. The language you taught me It’s useless, mother, their bombs Have made me deaf. And I live among the living dead. Otherwise, everything is alright And I have some wonderful friends But it looks to me Something might be done about The state of the world John Rety turned to poetry around 1980 having finally decided to give up painting when his studio was broken into and all his paintings were stolen. In the poems printed in this collection a judicious reader will be able to adduce underlying incidents and other significant details of the writer’s life. John Rety has previously published Song of Anarchy and Other Poems (1989); Banal Incidents from My First Period – a Prose Poem (1993); What’s in a Word (1996); A Stranger Here… (1998). His latest book is Between Languages which he shares with Ingeborg Santor. John Rety arrived in England in 1947, two years after the end of World War II and at the age of seventeen. Among others, he is the poetry editor of the Well Versed column which appears on Thursdays in the Morning Star daily newspaper.
POETRY: 21st Century Verse"THE most we can hope for," writes John Rety in his pamphlet In the Museum (Hearing Eye, £3), "is that we might be understood by others/With different understandings to ourselves."In an age of exile, displacement, emigration and immigration, it is not only poets who need to be understood. It is usually the poorest people who speak the most languages.Rety knows what he is talking about. Born in Hungary, he came to Britain in 1947.His poetry has the clear, dream-like quality of a good translation - and there are translations here from the Hungarian poets Attila Jozsef and Sandor Petofi.Like Ivor Cutler, Rety enjoys mixing the serious and the silly, as in A Choice of Occupation - "There were some whose occupation/was the occupation of territories/and there were those/whose occupation was work ... The more abundance was produced/the more the occupiers took/the more the people worked/the more they got exploited ... All because of a word with two meanings."....The rest of this review can be found at: http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index2.php/free/culture/arts/poetry_born_of_the_world
Andy Croft
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