Budapest to Babel

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Price: £10.00
(RRP: £12.99)
Release Date: 14/10/2008
ISBN: 978-0954392062

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(6 votes)

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 lively and rewarding exploration of the difficulties and joys of language. Often poignant, always inventive, states of confusion and chaos, playfulness and delight, are all explored with a freshness of style and tone. An original and unique talent.

"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

"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

"These are mainly prose poems, largely in sequences, and are ambitious in scope. But they are quiet poems whose understatement, over the course of the collection, becomes part of the point they make. Because of this, _Budapest to Babel_ is an audacious book. Thouroughly of itself and the present moment ... the poet's tone is dry, calm, ever so slightly hopeless, yet alive to the flashes of colour and humour that make up life."
-- Katy Evans-Bush, Poetry London

_Budapest to Babel_ was launched at The Hugarian Cultural Centre in London in January 2009 and has appeared on television in Hungary, Australia and the US.

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