Budapest to Babel

Winner of the inaugural Jane Martin Prize for Poetry. ...and I watch the oxidised stations go by slowly dozing to the sound of the fine talk in a cradle of soft sentences...through the window I spot two storks over the lake, two forgotten orthographic signs I could not read anymore written in the reeds wings open...and I notice another one and two or three more; the entire country covered with copper-beaked white storks. 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 rewarding and focussed exploration of the difficulties and joys of encountering and engaging fully with a new language.

States of confusion and chaos, playfulness and joy are all explored throughout this lively and rewarding debut. Agnes Lehoczky was born in 1976 in Budapest. Station X (2000) and Medalion (2002), her first two short collections, were published in Budapest by Universitas.

Her work has been published in a number of places in print and online in Hungary and the UK. "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"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