Poetry can only be born of deep conviction. Yet everything begins with instinct. At this stage, matter merely squints. “give me / my daily poem” – so runs Erzsébet Tóth’s supplication. And this psalm-like prayer, within the hieratic space of writing, can hardly be anything other than the presentation of a vocation. Faith, clarity of vision, knowledge, intuition, experience: fused entities; and for the poet standing opposite the career, each of them a blank sheet. All this is connected to that law-like principle which calculates the possibility of correction from the complete no to the complete yes. To write, from around the middle of the twentieth century onwards, is an exceptionally complicated act. Homer and Berzsenyi are complex, Petőfi as well. Not to mention Shakespeare or Goethe.

Yet the monstrous wars and delirium-inducing ideologies of this century have wounded all those fundamental values that once bound civilisations together like inviolable supporting clasps. Unleashed madness and disciplined value-destruction have done their work, mixing a peculiar flavour and meaning into complexity itself. The natural oscillation of historical contradictions has become so disordered that simple absurdity now appears almost merciful. Gradually, human beings must sustain themselves not in the world, for the world, but against the world. The century, with an imagination squeezed in the press of nihilism and violence, seeks to claim its share of the beautiful. That lyrical conception which is also Erzsébet Tóth’s, and which wishes to articulate personality not merely in terms of its own aims and interests but as the plastic form of a community, while attaching moral reflection to these voices as well, had to begin many things anew in the middle of the twentieth century. (“yet it is still she who must sanctify every word of ours” – she says, drawing inspiration precisely from László Nagy.) Within this creative conception it can indeed be stated that every single artistic solution is a feat pitched against a barricade. Does the artist truly possess the creation through which she may once again recreate the eternal object of her rebellion, her rapture, her assertion, her negation, her love and her hatred: reality? Today, there is no authenticity without arduous fidelity.

Poetry, therefore, is love and defiance, and can only be born of deep conviction. It is another question that writing may take many forms. Even as the prey of alienation from life. With little heart and an abundance of cynicism. If attitude matters, then it matters even more what kind of phraseology an alert, surveying consciousness manages to find.

“Only saw you, only landscape, movements, / I think people to you, / I only imagine your awakening, / your crying, your laughter…” – writes Erzsébet Tóth in her work Egy végtelen vers közepe (The Middle of an Infinite Poem). And a step further on, making her awakening poetic consciousness more precise, she formulates it thus: “And everything is only so much.” The awakened poet’s taut, thesis-like sentence strikes out from the emotional saturation of the entire poem. As if it were immediately laying claim to an ars poetica. Proust’s demanding resolve lives on. At this moment it is at work in a young woman poet who searches for the health of a disintegrating world, yet harbours no illusions: “everything is only so much.” This thickly drawn contour is a sign that, within the shifting emphases of Erzsébet Tóth’s literature of experience, the boundary and the horizon that appear incessantly will be rationality.

We can see that, after all, an exceptional moment does release art and reality from their ambiguity. In creation they flow into one another. Essentially, the question concerns the degree of stylisation: from here the creator takes off towards fulfilment, and the momentarily flaring light of this movement reveals whether the sequence of words and sentences ordered by style is merely the obscure play of the mind, or an intellectual act whose outcome is a world underpinned by reasons and quasi-laws. “you could already exist without your body […] you could be dream you could be imagination / and still vibrate simultaneously in thirty / unfinished novels…” – writes Erzsébet Tóth in Pillanatképeket gyűjtő (Collecting Snapshots), for whom multiplicity is at once a belief in depth. Reality, then, which she recomposes, is elevated onto a particular plane of consciousness that can never be fully exhausted. In everything she perceives, in everything she cuts out of experience through description, there is already such a degree of saturation of passion, motive and rapture, of impatiently lining-up words, that it tempts the sublimity of creation itself. Authors who are aware of their vocation, of course, do not thirst for the philosophical governance of their desires; rather, it is a heartfelt bond to reality that propels them onward. This type, like Erzsébet Tóth herself, is incapable of resisting temptation: she does not stop at expression. She does not simply long for raw material; amid certain moral deliberations, she searches with yearning for the form through which she may multiply and justify reality. And this is no longer merely the triumph of description; here the temptation is already strong to speak quite truly and definitively of the emergence of colours, symbols, laws, image-filtered interrelations and secret vibrations – that is, of the creation of worlds of one’s own. All this, in a poet who has reached the gate of form, is at once a rational and a mystical longing. And it is precisely here, at the gate of form, that originality is first put to the test – an originality that immediately bestows upon the poet an aesthetic autobiography..

Erzsébet Tóth’s originality lies in the fact that she has created her own measure.

It was born and grew strong within the poetic celebrations of great convictions.

Like all truly original poetry, hers too is guided by the fertile demand that its complex art should increasingly approach the sublime simplicity of knowing how to live. Her arrival in literature – through the famous and infamous generational anthology Madárúton (On the Path of Birds) – immediately drew the attention of the guild. Still instinctive in her initial momentum, Erzsébet Tóth, learning from the transitions between chance and craftsmanship and pushing her boundaries ever more boldly, nevertheless remained faithful to herself.

Her imagination, which sees things in their rawness and at the same time as dream-images, is carried off into a mighty supplication: “To pray – the mountains kneel at my feet, that I may be stream-water held in the palm, / a hay-bed, a pine-will. / For from God I received the bird-path, / from the apostles, flowers.” (Madárúton (On the Path of Birds)) The proximity of the Word is the advance pledge of her fate. The very first poem of her debut volume already reveals much about her: “I come supported by dirt roads… I attached myself to rivers / with a single flute, / the swing does not let go of my hand.” A precise image of destiny. Reverie and reality clasp one another here, so that the revelation of the depth and height of their vortex-like relationship will (at least as a partial task) find Erzsébet Tóth again and again. For the time being, however, this is still the realm of “loose-haired mornings”, when “horses shirts doves skirts” come streaming.

It is almost certain that Erzsébet Tóth is the most mature poet in the much-mentioned anthology Madárúton (On the Path of Birds), which, due to an unfortunate misreading, came to be regarded as an attempt to register a faceless generation, whereas in fact it was intended as the lyrical birth register not of a faceless but of a misled generation. The background is slack, indifferent, pallid. Only the contours of particular, separate rebellions, scattered like islands, flare up for longer or shorter periods. (The very existence of the poets of Elérhetetlen föld (Unreachable Land), for example, already constitutes an irrevocable protest against the order of futile promises and honeyed lies.) Power grows ever more rotten; gradually even its adherents practise their loyalty amid manoeuvres and tricks. Saying and contradiction become intermingled. And by the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, it becomes virtually a matter of principle, a non-violent stage, a measure of rectitude, as to who can lie more convincingly to the other. Meanwhile, the enclosing walls begin to crack! And from the other side of the wall the wind carries in, through the interstices, strange melodic fragments, unfamiliar sounds. News arrives; from Erzsébet Tóth, for instance, comes the Távirat (Telegram): “if I was, if I am, / now is the time to rise again, / now is the time to stun butcher and cleaver, / to begin an ancient human dance, / to knock every wine, every honey from my hand, / to gather every curse above my head into a halo, / now is the time to step off the marshy carpet”.

Testing the proportions of images and concepts, and experimenting with other constitutive demands of creation, Erzsébet Tóth’s poems pass on to one another with ever greater clarity what it is that unifies this lyric poetry and will continue to unify it. Let us take any number of works from any phase of the oeuvre at will: open Egy végtelen vers közepe (The Middle of an Infinite Poem) or the volumes Gyertyaszentelő (Candlemas), A lisszaboni járat (The Lisbon Flight), and do we not see that in every one of her poems the aim is to heal the wounds inflicted upon primary values. Here, in the deepest sense of the word, the only thing that matters is that the Word, illuminating worlds, should be true. Erzsébet Tóth, who writes of cool peace, moreover plays with tonnage-weight burdens as few do: “I shall be a skull in the hand of a Hamlet-country,” she formulates in one place.

The restlessness that vibrates through Erzsébet Tóth’s style and thinking is the passion of everyday life. But it is also a passion that rises out of the everyday. “This is another time now, some Oblomov-time, at once / child-time and old-time, play-time, time-not-to-get-up.” (A macska – The Cat.) One may decide for oneself whether it is rebellion or negation when the moment sets itself against the age.

Now then, as for the outcome: the century-old stimulus of Hungarian poetry, the Nyugat-inspired encouragement, by the early to mid-1980s had become more than smuggled contraband – as so many times in distant periods before (as, for instance, in the days of Szenczi Molnár Albert or Endre Ady), it was once again resounding beneath the window. Indeed: “Jane Fonda and Angela Davis will come here,” and following a long enforced hiatus, the various spiritual orientations of Western poetic schools arrive here as well – through individual volumes or anthologies – allowing the spirit to try on forms previously known only by hearsay, forms in which it suddenly feels at home. At the same time, the poetry of the present moment is enriched around her through figures such as István Ágh, István Bella, Sándor Csoóri, Ágnes Gergely, Gizella Hervay, Gyula Illyés, Márton Kalász, Ottó Orbán, József Utassy, István Vas, and Sándor Weöres. And with an entirely new kind of tonal colouring and the merciless turning-out of the soul, here too is the Boston-born Sylvia Plath, with the extensive selected volume Zúzódás (Bruise). Alongside the masters she found through choices both assumed and not always consciously acknowledged even to herself, it is she, Sylvia Plath, who becomes for Erzsébet Tóth’s talent the message arriving from afar, all the more encouraging for that distance: not as adaptation, not as solution, but as the encourager of originality. And what Sylvia Plath represents from afar and from abroad, Sándor Csoóri represents from close at hand and from home.

The interwoven radiance of influence and talent is now such that Erzsébet Tóth makes it known, through a series of confessions, that her striving is directed not only towards turning her individuality or private emotions into verse, nor is her imagination stirred solely by personal doubts. She wishes to speak much for many. And the concerns of society leave her anything but indifferent. She is young: she is drawn to the excessive, to the monumental. She is young: now “the earth itself must grow feverish” beneath her. Her questions and answers are born within a certain inner fidelity: she feels she owes something to this side of the world; she owes something to her own people, to her Hungarianness – she owes them her loyalty and, if possible, visions of the greatest possible courage.

In Erzsébet Tóth’s eyes, the world is, of course, also a constraint, a bitter medium, the negation of her ideals – yet it is precisely within this world that she wishes to analyse herself. Is it really through moments in which a person tips over into reverie that unity is attained?

In Erzsébet Tóth, who has come into possession of her own domain, there remains an unbroken faith that the poetry of parts coheres (or can be made to cohere). And that above them, igniting like a sun and illuminating together, stand art (“the poems are amorous stars”), politics (“Jane Fonda and Angela Davis will come here, / but no one has pulled on Petőfi’s boots.”), and nature – say, a walnut tree – which itself knows more (“such moments do not vanish without trace”) than all the prophets of frivolity combined. Yes, organic formation in Erzsébet Tóth means that she wishes to lay down principles, while at the same time being ready to give over to the poem the most intimate part of her soul (which is almost identical with its most human part). All empathy, overflowing feeling, all tenderness, all girlish delicacy – and at the same time a communal oracle, all vocation, filled with the desire for representation. The everyday matters to her, life matters to her, and, according to her lines that surge into metaphysics, the infinite matters to her as well. This is why, in a very broad sense, virtually all her poems are love poems. For creation is the offspring of the heart and clear-sightedness; its most magnificent form is realised precisely when and where it appears as body – that is, when we discover, in the emotional situation whose narrow or wide boundaries are drawn by the effectiveness of amorous speech, the degree of closeness between author and audience. Thus arises the situation in which the heart comes to know, through its confession, how deep or superficial a bond connects it to another heart. To write is to transform indifference into attraction. (Does Babits’s epistemological premise come to mind at this point: “A love poem may be a more reliable source concerning Hungarian character than the poet’s most beautiful statements about Hungarianness.”)

“…I am not writing a poem when I write a poem: I want to live,” she says. The poet identifies spontaneously – but with what? She desires that the relations and peripeties of her personality should acquire spiritual meaning naturally and without strain. For passion, fresh insatiability – in a word, the advantage granted by youth – for the time being appears to be long-term. Nothing is stronger than life, and there is not a single nook, not a single fibre of it in which – whether with benevolent or cruel intent – a poem does not lie dormant. To live and to write – for the young woman, the two are one.

Unrestrained and free, like the verse form she has chosen as her own and to which she remains faithful across the full perspective of her oeuvre. She uses a symbolic language that expands from literary diction to slang, yet is in essence consistently univocal. In a Whitmanian manner, she strips the standards of poetics from her lines; she declares precious what the avant-garde so emphatically urged: that word should freely align beside word, without bonds. Thus it flows, surges. Yet she is equally prepared to set her words into terse, austere lines. From a well-realised free verse, on every occasion, like a mathematical element, like an evidence, the author’s desire for freedom unfolds. And indeed, it is truly extraordinary how, in Erzsébet Tóth, life and lyric poetry come home to one another.

Inevitably, nature and environment assemble within her a multitude of trunk-fragments. Her Easternness and Westernness are like those of us all. A Carpathian formation; a domain at once self-reliant yet receptive, at times divided, at other times expansive, somewhere between the Urals and the Alps, with the hoped-for glimmer of the Atlantic regions as a distant horizon.

She lays bare her soul, relying on images of the earth; revealing the lived experience of a generation, in an optimal proportion of irony and the tragic, by creating allegories in which – since the heart cannot be expelled from them – pathos is always lurking, along with a touch of free-spirited unruliness. An inner component of her intellectualism is emotion, whose constant cooling counterbalance is an earthbound, at times blasé prose. And just as her reality is the short-story-like poetic situation, so too is her reality a spiritual distance. “a bow to winter / a faithful subject / I am heavy for the earth with so much love / hawks flee from my eyes / the ringing in my ears: / as if the crippled sea were crying” (Pihenj, pihenj) (Rest, Rest).

If the ancient archetype of the solemn, ceremonial poem is not infrequently granted grace in Erzsébet Tóth’s workshop, the author evidently reconciles this gracious gesture with ease with that younger tradition which the (serious and playful alike) twentieth-century testers of beauty fitted onto the primal aesthetic. She is a learned poet, whose preparedness finds its meaning in receptivity and depth. Even in fragmentariness, she hopes to live through the adventure of fulfilment.

As if it were such a simple demand: she writes because she wants to say something. True, at times she even mocks this impulse, yet she trusts in the irreplaceable value of the beautiful word. In the belief that the fundamental motive of speech is beauty and freedom that have taken form within the conquered unknown. She is aware that, when it comes to words that strike back at misery and cry out for human dignity, language has thus far scarcely managed to create anything finer.

The great soul is not frightened by the pain of a fractured life. And a great soul is one driven by an irrepressible will to live – the great soul relates every moment of life to fate; from this it forges its work. A single word, a single situation, a single phenomenon suffices, and at once it rises above the fragmented world, sets out on a journey to conquer that corrected universe which stretches from backyard dimensions to the infinite.

“When I do not yet cry, and when I no longer do. / My reckoning of time consists of this.” The hysterical pride of the soul is also necessary for poetry, for laying bare inner life. At times one must confront this pride; at times one must pray to it, invite it, whimpering, shouting, begging it to grant at least its first word to the piece of work. Then, somehow, things will follow: the poem is needed; it is imperative to break into the barbarian band of words, to compel them to bring what lies behind visible things, from beyond the ever-shifting boundaries of reality, where silence appears inviolable. It is often said that silence is the cruel expression of the soul. Perhaps so. But it is not the most terrible curse of poetry. Pilinszky, for instance, was an Atlas with his silence.

When we speak of poetry as a sure aim, as a persistent and obstinate act that, on the pretext of a memory, a phenomenon, a smile, an obsession, traces the conquest of the unknown territories of reality back to intellectual and emotional unrest, we set about the work in youth. The question is whether we emerge from it old. The young remain young because they recognise something of the beauty of the unknown. They wish to give it a name. The old hesitate: in poetry, this is silence.

A political intervention in Szentendre, the stress tests of private lives, the guild’s denominational infighting, the sudden rusting of variegated morals, factional splits, whirlwinds of envy – many reasons may be adduced to explain the unexpected silence. There are scarcely any creative spirits whose paths do not meander. Indeed: is life itself not a vibrating, undulating line? When signs of floundering appear, the genius must be allowed to rest; it does not weaken – it catches its breath, takes in air, prepares, shifts position, takes stock, reassesses. And then begins again. If all this is inherent in writing, Erzsébet Tóth, at least outwardly, becomes a stranger to writing for a good long while. She scripts filmstrips, sells vegetables. Meanwhile, in the autumn of 1984, she is invited to New York for a poetry festival in the company of Sándor Csoóri, István Eörsi and Ottó Tolnai – a city to which the adventures of the heart will lead her back two years later. The poet, however, at least as far as public presence is concerned, remains a taciturn figure in literature. After almost a decade of poetic silence, she steps forward again with a volume: Arcod mögött május (May Behind Your Face) is published in 1993.

The volume marking her return clearly bears the traces of material gathered over time, from the uneven turns of a prolonged silence. Momentum (A fénylegény – The Light-Lad), nervous transformations (Ha látnál így estefelé – If You Saw Me Like This in the Evening), the sharpened conflicts of the soul (Chicago blues, Arcod mögött május – May Behind Your Face), and the taut, incisive poem that proves to be a great occasion for words (Vallomás – Confession) are all present here as well. Yet if poetry, even in the eyes of unbelievers, is the divine conducting of songs between the two banks of the visible and the invisible (is it worth writing with lesser ambition?), then the volume Arcod mögött május (May Behind Your Face) stands on a somewhat uncertain bridge. The restless poet flits about and suggests tendencies; the mood-swings of A Village lépcsőin (On the Steps of the Village) and Amerikai szerelem (American Love) are at the same time a stylistic eclecticism; an overly heterogeneous poetry, whose loosely handled imagery is overtaken by journalism; Lakitelek is the lyric of insiders; Szegények tavasza (Spring of the Poor) is a variation on an old motif, an elegiac pastel; Tükrök mélyén (In the Depths of Mirrors) marks the return of greatness.

The volume, woven from the dialogue between routine and originality, possesses a benefit beyond criticism in that it has come into being: with this book Erzsébet Tóth overcomes silence. And although in the epilogues of stagnation emotionality may have been wound up a little too high, alongside the appeal to the heart, composure and stance also proclaim their own word: “an unknown light heart was beating within me / the other I threw into the ocean” (Ismeretlen könnyű szívvel (With an Unknown Light Heart)).

The ocean. This word is somewhat frightening, yet encouraging, and inevitably a consequence.

Around the turn of the millennium, Erzsébet Tóth herself embodies considered flight – and she herself takes flight. If she so wishes: lightly. She lyricises the intrinsic value of phenomena; she knows excellently how to make her poem beautiful. Yet the light of authenticity also belongs to that Erzsébet Tóth who, in both her orderliness and her vehemence, is capable of a profound confession about community and homeland. “Grandmother, the maize cut my throat! / Even today I can feel the scent of her apron, / as she pressed me to herself, / and I can feel her hand on my neck. / And I can feel that green blade too, when sometimes in a single day / one has to cross this small country.” (Azt a zöld pengét (That Green Blade.))

She brings into harmony and does not deny. The personality is placed at the firm centre of her poems, yet true to her former self, it is new once again. A lisszaboni járat (The Lisbon Flight), for instance – although it records its subjects almost obsessively in external terms – in reality probes the inner secrets of the lyrical self; its demon and its delight are love, while its bittersweet nostalgia lies in the dilemma of what to do with her sense of communal commitment (Nem oszt, nem szoroz (It Makes No Difference), A nemzet cirkusza (The Circus of the Nation)).

She was once the poet of dreams, reveries, and fantasies that spoke of belonging; later, exceptional sensitivity and clarity of vision became the truest splendour of her poetry. Now she sings, with the same self-evident naturalness, of the memories of a childhood in Nyírség as she does of the spaces of the great city. (Gyarmat Street crossing Róna Street, Thököly Road, Szugló Street – in short, Zugló is her second small homeland, and A szív gyarmatai (The Colonies of the Heart) maps out this terrain even by street name.)

From the mouth of the once defiant lyricist of community and society, the poem – often even intimate lyric poetry – sounds with the contrasts of mockery: “Loving is no longer in fashion. / My God, how many farewells do you grant / before a single meeting? The passengers are already / scrambling for their luggage, the giant belts / spin too fast, circling round and round, // now I am spinning alone, no one takes me off, / no one has come for me, I remain here / on the winding, snake-like rails forever.” (A lisszaboni járat (The Lisbon Flight.))

)

Does poetry’s inner instinct dictate that she confront her surroundings and herself? Should it defend beauty or truth? Or perhaps the two within one another? Where do her own feelings end, and where does the external world begin? Does it begin at all? “What youth once illuminated / does not pass away. / Just as Ady does not pass, nor László Németh. / The homeland’s sparkling eternal sentences…”
(Égi ólomból (From Heavenly Lead.))

The rebellious poet, the flushed or proud social and communal mouthpiece, belongs to past years. A hot past, but past nonetheless. The traveller who has found a harbour now experiments with a new kind of courage. She is now free, for instance, to compare poetic schools within her own practice. At times she thunders, at times she grows tender, melancholic and blasé. She snatches moods from folklore (“I longed for the open sky, like the shepherds”), from the great science of childhood consciousness (“close your eyes, the sky is blue / like a school notebook, a calm being / as if you were: your own weapon”), from sociolects, from the tones of street language (“you still want to found a country / can’t you hear / that already at the end of the world / in the world-disco / fake smoke / fake hair / fake boys / fake cocks / fake purple smoke-boys are whining and writhing about history / five rings for ten fingers”). And she rinses all this with pleasure in the spritzer of Anglophone recipe–mixed, prose-infused lyricism (“one day you’ll be old, / among the lunatics of the Subway you’ll be talking / with Salinger”).

As powerfully as she soars at times in vast arcs, she is just as willing to plunge into the dreadful darkness of the lower life. Swift and slow. Often it is precisely in her rhythmic elements that she recalls the feverish, adolescent poet-girl. It is striking that from the tenderness she feels towards her past there do not flow only images of existential change, of values destroyed, of Edens of aspiration painstakingly built yet ultimately abandoned in the course of maturation; from here the poem also draws its pace and momentum. Only then does it slow, spreading out into beautiful, melancholic tracings. “almost I write a poem, almost I cry for you, / …you said: life is beautiful, / humanity is beautiful” – she wrote at the outset of her career. Thirty years later she continues as one in whom immersion in disillusion has become a worldview: “it is as if I spent the summers elsewhere / I do not remember spring or autumn either / dense snow-prison walls descended / end-of-the-world, deranged winters”
(Alma, orgona (Apple, Lilac); Aliz már nem lakik itt (Alice No Longer Lives Here)).

As the custodian of summers, she can boldly set herself against the indifference or saturation of the times. Deep within her soul, summer has always been flowing. Her secret is that she has seen sunlight on the face of the world, and that brightness provides arguments for thought. It is likely that this inspiration takes bodily form in the essay volume Camus napsütése (Camus’s Sunshine), published in 2005. To what extent the author’s reading experiences, assuming the shape of lyrical prose, become an aesthetic of art; to what extent the individual pieces of the volume are reflections, and to what extent they are small festivals of precise concision within the leaden chambers of book reviewing – this is of little interest. What matters is enthusiasm, at times a subtle resentment, a mood – that is, lyricism – slipping free of all generic pressure. A splendid, disciplined apologia. Here too it is the soul that the writer addresses, and effect and experience that are aimed at the reader.

A year after the essay volume comes Láncok a csuklón (Chains on the Wrist, 2006), another prose book. Acknowledging the sustaining and at the same time flesh-eating nature of emotions, the author composes a heart-clenching, dark-toned, lyrically segmented prose grand monologue into which she also weaves documents of the age. She composes – or rather would compose – were it not for lyrical intoxication and subjectivity turning the novelistic impulse into a somewhat rambling confession. Erzsébet Tóth’s youth sprouts here once again, yet time immediately cuts down the shoot. How far this lyrical zigzag, populated by concrete individuals, fellow professionals, and heroes hidden behind initials, remains a personal matter – and whether it is capable of repeatedly drawing an outsider’s distracted attention back into the vortex of private affairs – is highly questionable. Among Erzsébet Tóth’s prose works, the most variegated is also the most cohesive: the feuilletons and notes of Szívhangok (Heartbeats), published in 2008. Here the notary of everyday life offers clear testimony to her greatness: in the solid, substantial volume almost every second piece rises from short-term daily actuality to the level of symbol, precisely through its multiple emotional resonances. The subject matter is diverse, the narratives of the feuilletons varied, yet from the local scenes of life there constantly emerges the sensitivity and practicality of femininity. This same receptive femininity is evident in Kőrózsa (Stone Rose), published in 2012 – a drama-epic work written for two voices, carried onto a creative plane inaccessible to the other sex, feminine in its poetic quality, yet just as much (or even more so) a prose composition. In this work, which by its visual layout appears to be a poem, a certain lyrical quality undoubtedly plays a role, yet it is not without that more extensive mode of representation usually called epic. Kőrózsa is an unsettled, shattering book. Its ravaged quality – pulsating in expression and ripening into tragedy in content – whether prose or lyric, is a confession of renewal. A form that penetrates into extraordinary depths.

Erzsébet Tóth’s entire, coherent body of work most naturally encompasses her subtle transformations. In any case, from the suddenly acclaimed, dreamy and somewhat untamed young poet of her beginnings, she has by now become a sceptical, ironic writer, at times still capable of enthusiasm, but above all one who thinks responsibly. To bind oneself to country, to humanity, to the heart, to novelty – few dare to do so, and even fewer can do so with the authenticity she possesses. Her defence, her backing, her gold, her future, her guarantee to readers is authenticity.

The balance of her verse-sentences lies in the aptness and irreplaceability of the declaimed words. The distinctively contoured poem (and the incorporation into the work of prose fragments reporting on moments of contemplation preceding the poem) constitutes, however, a kind of incursion into the familiar terrain of lyric poetry which – even if it may somewhat enrich it – at once stretches and strains the formal boundaries of lyric. She writes poems that preserve and document place and time; she seeks to give form both to her stance and to the circumstances surrounding that stance. At times these take the shape of sumptuous descriptions, at others of commentaries, of narrative prose.

Carrying her image-dense, intricately woven early poems over into the period of unfolding, she sang – and continues to sing – an intoxicatingly multicoloured material onto her poetic past, otherwise caring nothing for the ideally imagined law of balance between oration and creation (A nyúl (The Hare), Megszületik augusztusban (Born in August), Nyáresti hüllők (Summer Evening Reptiles)). She is the free poet of free verse.

One may admire her softness and her solidity, her heart-gripping episodes tinged with prose; one may marvel at her visions, her wit, her slyness; it is easy to fall in love with her clarity of vision – yet it is not these, singled out at the expense of the whole, that postulate the mature Erzsébet Tóth. For her, too, the whole is only as much as renews itself in spring and freezes in winter. But poetry is not merely a function of weather and climate zones. Poetry is also the act of saying no to all those influences that seek to disturb one’s fidelity to one’s own individuality; and poetry is the recognition that, for a time, what is new may be very precious, but only what is true endures. And poetry is that certain passage through the world. Covered with lines about love for life. With doubts, with pains, with psalms of the congregation of sunlight. And Erzsébet Tóth’s name stands there on the authors’ roll of this infinite poem.

[2015]