My Secret Life by Krisztina Tóth, translated by George Szirtes

Krisztina Tóth is one of the leading Hungarian poets of the generation who began publishing in the late 1980s. The recipient of many awards, she is also renowned for her fiction which has been translated into many languages including English. My Secret Life is the first translation of Krisztina Tóth's poetry into English. The poems were selected by her from three of her eleven published collections, with the addition of some new or previously uncollected poems. 'Her work has the nervous energy of the times but is shaped by a deep and disciplined intelligence. Her subjects are invariably human. They are concerned with love, family, friendship, loss, and a kind of existential disaffection. Tragic in one sense but ever inventive, full of life's minute yet highly resonant particulars, they seem to extend into an almost cinematic narrative about the cruelties of factory farming, murder, ageing, the treatment of women as sex toys and death itself. She is a bravura formalist when she needs to be. Her vigour and scope are enormous.' - George Szirtes