WEEPING TARPAULIN

Krisztina Tóth’s previous volume, Powder Snow, was hailed as one of the most significant Hungarian literary works of the new millennium, winning the prestigious Palládium Prize.  Ever since, its author has remained one of the most popular members of the young generation of poets. With her exceptional sense of form, Krisztina Tóth weaves the fabric of Weeping Tarpaulin into a fascinating whole with tender care. The refined cycles of poems reveal a hard-won discipline and extraordinary sensitivity. She seeks the eternal truths hidden behind everyday events in her poems, by looking behind the scenes of everyday events. The spectacle that unfolds before us is not always heartwarming; the precisely drawn, enlarged details sometimes point to an uncertain, mysterious, ominous outcome. In a world where even truck tarpaulins burst into tears and everything disappears almost as soon as it comes into being, silence and silent contemplation become the means of survival. Krisztina Tóth’s poetry seems to be about trivial things: a used washing machine, a loose cable, a cat’s paw print, but between the lines lie the most important and mostly unanswerable questions of our existance.