Product Description
The evolution of Farkas’ poetry since he began writing it 35 years ago illuminates one of Montreal’s key literary figures, first, as one of the Vehicule poets of the 1970s, an experimental group of writers bent on celebrating life and pushing the boundaries of their craft and, later, as one profoundly aware of his role as a poet engaged with the world, one with a social conscience and a moral obligation to speak about it. In many of his darker poems, he ruminates on oppression and injustice and on some of the sources of Man’s more subtle discontent, but always somewhere in the shadows lurks a hopefulness, an awareness that the jazz that paints the night is also about love and human fellowship—and compassion. As a poet, Endre Farkas celebrates the flux, the internal energy of a poem. He is not afraid to &#quot;play&#quot; or to follow a poem down a strange road, sometimes detouring into unfamiliar territory. He has never been afraid to revisit a piece years later or to rethink it for the stage. Perhaps he has a little of the gypsy in him. Forced to flee his native Hungary at a young age, he saw himself, in the early days, as a writer in exile, an immigrant Canadian trying to make sense of a new reality and a complicated past. It is undoubtedly what informed his early writing and what, in subtler and more complex ways, continues to frame the more recent meanderings of his imagination. And just where have these meanderings led him? Down a myriad of roads, a map of which is here, in this selection. Leaving the Big questions to the philosophers, he has chosen, instead, to answer his own questions by writing about the quotidian, the everyday. For him, the poem is an act of consciousness&#ndash;raising, a fragment that reflects a piece of the universe, the &#quot;here&#quot; of the moment he happens to occupy, ultimately nudging the reader along his own path into an awareness about that universe. In the end, the poem is a well of inspiration, hope, consolation, celebration. And, of course, it is food for thought.
About the Author
Endre Farkas was born in Hajdunanas, Hungary in 1948 to survivors of the Holocaust. Along with his parents, he escaped Hungary during the 1956 revolution and has lived in Quebec ever since. He is a poet who has had eight collections of poetry published. Farkas has been collaborating with artists from other disciplines for over twenty years and many of his performance pieces have toured across Canada. Emile Martel has been publishing poetry and prose since 1969. His books include Les enfances brisees, L’ombre et le silence, Les gants jetes, and Bingt fois le corps des femmes. D.G. Jones has translated a variety of Quebec poetry. He won the Governor General’s Award for his translation of Norman de Bellefeuille’s Categorics (1992).
