Shelter under the Sun: Poetry of Three Hungarian Women - Paperback

by Zita Izsó (Author), Krisztina Rita Molnár (Author), Borbala Kulin (Author)

Borbála Kulin's poetry is the closest to what-at least in Central European literature-has traditionally been expected of women poets' in subject matter and approach. Her poems deal with love, home, the experience of the female body, individuality, and uniqueness. She tries to describe and make sense of a world that constantly confines and hurts even those who make every effort to adapt to it. But the image breaks into fractal-like, self-repeating pixels and the concepts of woman, mother, family, home, country, and body lose their meanings. The impossibility of being at home goes beyond the actual geographic and social reasons, but the speaker of the poems can still find her voice in the tiny, preserved pieces of this fragmented worldview.

In Zita Izsó's poems the speech situations illustrate the words of the internationally renowned psychologist András Feldmár on trauma: "Trauma in reality is not what that happened to you, but the fact that it's impossible to talk about it to anyone. The experience is frozen." Izsó's poetry-using images of ice, melting, and freezing-renders this experience with incredible power. The self in the poems speaks for all the silenced, swept-under-the-carpet, "collateral" victims, and does so without dissolving their exclusion. The horror and inhumanity of what has happened to the victims strike our hearts in language they are excluded from. It is is solid, safe making certain things unspeakable and certain experiences taboos. Izsó shows us people who blame themselves for what they went through. Domestic violence, terminal illness, traumas of war, the exclusion and vulnerability of homeless refugees all appear in these poems. Some of the oems treat the traditional, traumatic experiences of womanhood-infertility, giving birth to a disabled child, harassment, rape. These are poems of indispensable confrontation. They show that in experience there is no private and foreign, the boundaries of the common and the personal are within us, and are illusions. This universal level of experience and empathy, which can be called Christlike, without exaggeration, makes her poems an authentic, unflinching voice of morality without becoming dogmatic, moralizing, or offering false comfort or absolution.
The speaker's language in Krisztina Rita Molnár's poetry circulates like an elusive, untraceable patch of light among the objects and occurrences of the world, society, and history: always flying to a new place, hiding its source and body from us. She doesn't call anything her own. She has no home, though she is able to reach and observe every place. She is playing, pointing out surprising moments to wonder at, but before being fully absorbed in it, she moves on. Yet her attention is like a child's, exquisite and straightforward. The poems point things out and raise them into conscious as their most important task. As the poem Oil Lamp conceives it (paraphrasing the biblical parable of the wise and foolish virgins with multiple irony), the goal is to maintain the boundary. But this is only an indication, a signal to the ever-moving line between conscious and unconscious. There is no need to do anything else. These poems suggest that this boundary, the moment of this glance and attention, are what we really are. So any kind of perpetuance and solidification would imprison the playful, ever-wandering, always-in-motion light of consciousness. That is why Krisztina Rita Molnár's poetry keeps the reader in perpetual motion. If we would feel that we understand, she immediately marks it, makes the situation uncertain by the conscious, reflective use of form, rhythm, and rhyme. The poem's speaker gives us an ironic wry look and disappears.

In the Persian rug in her poem "A Million Stitches" readers can see both sides of it. We won't step on it with the certainty that it's ours, as it's "rightfully ours", and we are at home with it.