Always Different
Poems of Memory
Published on 26. May 2022
Book
Paperback/Softback
196 pages
978-1-64605-123-6 (ISBN)
Description
The poems in Jenei's collection Always Different: Poems of Memory grapple with childhood, memory, and time. The poet looks back forty years and imagines himself as a boy-the narrator of the poems-looking forward into the future. Thus the poems combine moments with sweeps of time, village scenes with rumblings of societal and technological change. In the tradition of Hungarian writers Peter Nadas and Agota Kristof, Jenei grapples with war and destruction, loneliness, desire, and loss. The literary historian Eva Banki calls Jenei "one of the great masters of Hungarian free verse"-adding that his poems also hold an epic theme, "the strange underworld of the Kadar era, rural Hungary shown through a child's eye." Through their storytelling, searching, and rhythms, these poems take us into our communal yet private longing for self-knowledge, history, and home.
Reviews / Votes
"One of the great masters of Hungarian free verse." -Eva Banki"What are we looking for in our childhood when we take stock of such and such events, sins, tragedies?... A silent poet whose every word I hear." -Laszlo Darvasi
"Real lyrical ingenuity." -Ferenc Simon
"One afternoon I read through Gyula Jenei's Always Different, more than a hundred pages of poetry, and after the first poems I said to myself that yes, this is my world." -Vince Fekete
"The culmination of a lyrical material with a rich past." -Adam Sebestyen
"One of the most striking registers of Hungarian poetry of the 2000s... So naturally embraces the pulse of the Hungarian language that every memory that is expressed in them thus suddenly emerges from insignificant mundaneness and finds itself confronted with eternity." -Balazs Fuzfa
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Texas
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 226 mm
Width: 150 mm
Thickness: 12 mm
Weight
204 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-64605-123-6 (9781646051236)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Gyula Jenei (born in 1962 in Abadszalok, Hungary) is a poet, writer, editor, and educator. As founder and editor of the quarterly literary magazine Eso (translatable as "Rain" or "Falling"), he has brought literature and literary events to the Szolnok area for over twenty years. His poems and other writings comprise fifteen books.
Diana Senechal, a writer, translator, and educator, is the 2011 winner of the Hiett Prize in the Humanities, awarded annually by the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Her translations of the Lithuanian poems of Tomas Venclova have been published in two books, Winter Dialogue (Northwestern University Press, 1997) and The Junction (Bloodaxe, 2008). Senechal teaches English, American civilization, and British civilization at the Varga Katalin Gimnazium in Szolnok, Hungary.
Diana Senechal, a writer, translator, and educator, is the 2011 winner of the Hiett Prize in the Humanities, awarded annually by the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Her translations of the Lithuanian poems of Tomas Venclova have been published in two books, Winter Dialogue (Northwestern University Press, 1997) and The Junction (Bloodaxe, 2008). Senechal teaches English, American civilization, and British civilization at the Varga Katalin Gimnazium in Szolnok, Hungary.