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Contents

Prologue: Árpád Farkas and His Poetry

Upon our Fathers' Faces
At the Age of Twenty
My Mother
Let There be No Silence
Hangover Song
Teenager Romance
Love, Young Pony
Warm Wind
The Elegy of Nagyszoros
Noon
Girls on the Farm
September
Story
Bells
Crossing the Border
The Walled-Up Pulpit in Vienna
Abroad
The Seven Dwarves
Sharp Rain
Doors and Windows
The Laughing You
Caresses
Our Heart's ideal Love
Dance
The Smoke of Summers
The Ablutions of Old Men
Old Folks
Migrant Workers
The Greening Plow Handles
Signal
I Remain
The Plaster Elf of our Garden
Flute Song
The Silence of Mothers
When You Come
Eyelash Forest
Forceful Game
At the Train Station
In Flood
A Ring of Lombardy Poplars
Psalm
Don't Trust...
Against the Horror
Together
In Seepage
The Old School: Farkas Gymnasium
Interrogation
The Chosen of Perfection: János Bolyai
The Roar of the Scourgesong
To Sándor Kányádi
Our Reserves
Tavern Smoke
Cold Spell
Early Spring
In Servitude
The Quarry Miner Poet
Archeology
The Smell of Snow
Gentle Tune
Tunnels in the Snow
Dózsa-Face
The Last Mining Horse
The Law
Evening Fevers
Lather
Black Christmas
Wild Dill
At the Edge of Permanent Snow
Blood-Soaked Snow
The Song of a Self-Made Bird
In Whetstone Weather
The Risk
The Sewer
A Hand Wave
Linden Leaf
Where Rain and Snow Meet
For His Mother's Lost Hair
When Hope Springs from Graves
Song
The Wanderer

Biographies
Acknowledgements

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Foreword

This Transylvanian poet is at home everywhere: in the world, in his homeland, in the cataclysm of feelings and in the white heat of reasoning. He is characterized equally by the hardness of oaks and the tender nature of wild flowers. He hit the road, and like the hero of folktales, he has just about reached his goals. He speaks all fired up and with the conviction of the enthralled. He often raises an arm, never to hit someone, but to beckon or signal or pat; he is not infected by the violence of our time.

Formal and free verse do not simply alternate in his hands but almost associate in order to give immaculate expression to an experience. It would be hard to point out a contemporary poet who can use form in the service of meaning as successfully. Almost every one of his experiences creates its own form; his poetry is a series of successful birthing. All this testifies to inner order; even though our age does not lack in injured souls, overgrown by cancerous burdens and unable to free themselves. This poet is wholesome in the original sense of the word. He wants for nothing; he has found his place in the world; he unblinkingly faces the problems of our time and his personality - he can work out the dramatic harmony of our era.

A significant part of contemporary poetry is infested with a new linguistic fungus: vaguely conceived sentences. Árpád Farkas is known for the sincerity, clarity and bravery of his declarative sentences. He can speak openly because his soul and sensation of life are open, which ensures that he never for a minute falls behind the turmoil of the world. As a result, he does not lack in judgment and can evaluate human events; he can jubilate as well as protest. The poets of old also served as watchmen, bells alerting the community, prophets with foresight, medicine men who had balm for every wound. This kind of calling is burning inside Árpád Farkas.

Géza Féja
(Writer, journalist)

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