Always Different: Poems of Memory

This collection of poetry from Hungarian master Gyula Jenei, peers into nostalgia and its uncertainties, grappling with histories and temporalities that are unrecognizable or gone.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 196 pages
Publication date: 26 May 2022
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing

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 Péter Nádas and Ágota Kristóf, Jenei grapples with war and destruction, loneliness, desire, and loss. The literary historian Éva Bánki 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 Kádár 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.

Dimension: 228 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781646051236