Budapest to Babel

This book is Ágnes Lehóczky's first published poetry collection in English - and boy, is it a doozy. As the book's title suggests, she draws heavily on the sociological and historical experiences of linguistic mishap, inarticulated or poorly-articulated trains of thought buffetting each other as the whorl around the mindscape of possible communication across the loquacious border-patrols of Different Actual Languages - probing at whether translation is possible at all - or if it is poetry could never exist sufficiently to the task, and can only pour petrol into the tornado of communications and dreams...

   I really enjoyed this book. The poems are chunked into three parts, the first dealing with our sense of linguistic home-ness, the second exploring the contemporary Babel-scape in biblically subtle twists of genius language-manipulation; the third finally looking through the eyes of Narcízs (a poetic type, we may presume) at this same wordscape and inviting open critique of everything said, unsaid and/or half-said throughout the book entire. The are poems that stare into your depths as they confound your expectations, as if to drop some immense wisdom egg into your craw, only to bark like crows and flap away idly again as though their invisible task was complete and the non-comprehension of over-hearers means nothing to them. A powerfully evocative collection that will provoke much thought about language, peace (of the inner and/or outer types) and possibility.