Witch's Island and Other Poems
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PETER HARGITAI’s work, both in scope and in style, remains well outside the pale of current poetic fashion including the McPoems of MFA mills and the lip-tongue-ear literature of hip hop. Influenced by the great Hungarian poet Attila József’s obsession with the eternal mother as a metaphor for all human longing, Hargitai probes the nature of spiritual exile on terms that are neither Freudian nor Jungian, American or Hungarian, but on terms that are uniquely personal and movingly human.
WITCH’S ISLAND (1728–)for the Roma of Hungary
The sun that thawed
Winter all day,
By twilight lay
In one exhausted breath
In the town of Szeged
Where tonsured monks
Long buried swarm again
Out of the dark caves
Of the Inquisition.
Except this time they come
As tattooed skinheads,
Tongue-sure, wicked,
And armed with sticks.
Like locusts
They have invaded
Witch’s Island
For Ecstasy and the Rave,
And once again
Darkness is made.
Ten young girls danced Around a raging fire
All naked, inciting all To raise the dead
And dance their feet off For the great Baal.
Their moans were measured.
It is said that one dark girlWas dragged forward To answer for the unspeakable.
She was small and willowy
Her inky skin unholy
Like her heretical idol
In the Bhagavad Gita,
Thus spake
The tongue-sure rabble.
Fenced with saffron tongues As they burnt off her skin.
And she wailed before she died, Before the hush of holy sacrifice.
And her sinful thighs Created for the danse macabre
Withered into ashes.
Outside the white circle
There is still no light,
And the locusts reenact
Their murderous chorus
In this awful darkness.
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About the Book
PETER HARGITAI’s work, both in scope and in style, remains well outside the pale of current poetic fashion including the McPoems of MFA mills and the lip- tongue- ear literature of hiphop. Influenced by the great Hungarian poet Attila József’s obsession with the eternal mother as a metaphor for all human longing, Hargitai probes the nature of spiritual exile on terms that are neither Freudian nor Jungian, American, or Hungarian, but on terms that are uniquely personal and movingly human.
“If traditional confessional poetry, now considered classical, had its halcyon days in the work of Roethke, Lowell, and Plath, it can be said to have reached a new, ethnically charged peak in the work of Peter Hargitai.”
Pembroke Magazine
“Peter Hargitai is a remarkable versatile and humanely touching poet with a truly distinctive style and voice. These deeply probing intellectual poems exhibit an impressive range and vivacity of genres."
Laurence Lieberman Poetry Editor University of Illinois PressAbout the Author
Peter Hargitai has taught English, rhetoric, and literature for four decades. As a poet, novelist, and translator, he has garnered numerous literary awards including the Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Fust Milan Award from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Pro Cultura Hungarica Medal and the 2009 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Poetry Prize. His translation of Attila József is listed in Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages.