Hungary's Agnes Nemes Nagy (1922-91) is one of Europe's major modern poets. Her poems are clear and packed at once, monumental yet crystalline in their thought and organisation. The vast
pressures of her nation's troubled history find their equivalent in human feeling, voiced through the extraordinary compressed power and explosive formality of Nemes Nagy's poetry. Her subjects
include nature, myth and the vastnesses of geological time, but her manner is epic, tragic and epigrammatic.
This selection contains poems from all periods of Nemes Nagy's output, from the 1940s to work written immediately prior to her death. It includes poems from her Akhenaton cycle where she
grapples most intensely with history, responsibility and justice, carving a new theology or cosmology out of these desperately fissile forces. Identifying with the Egyptian boy-king, she looks
to invent a necessary god: recalling the energies of the 1956 Uprising, she tries to find rituals to articulate them - as her wild, wild thought is carved into large, clear, national forms.
