Where is our past, and where are we headed in the present?
Reading Krisztina Tóth’s poems, written and compiled between 2020 and 2025, we encounter situations in life where the familiar and the unfamiliar are not opposites, but rather follow from each other. Nothing could be further away than what or who was once within our reach. We can glimpse the unknown in ourselves and the familiar in others. Krisztina Tóth is a great poet of memory and remembrance. „If you write this poem, listen carefully: / this poem already exists. We found it in a volume on a shelf in your home. / Perhaps you just forgot it was there.” Memories and dreams, photographs and objects, misreadings and realizations, monologues and echoes alternate in Szeleknek fordít’s formally rich poems, from rhyming verses to haikus, which are once again important and organized into a separate cycle. Turning to the Winds is an elemental, lively, cathartic volume, and the poems linger with the reader for a long time: „the past rustles, nothing passes away.”
