#RivetingReviews: Maria Jastrzębska reviews MY SECRET LIFE by Krisztina Tóth

There is something waiting to break out below the surface of the everyday in these poems. In “River of Sounds,” the river, literal and metaphorical, is in spate. What will its 

… wrinkled bed carry on the sludge?
Time and again bodies come floating down the flood.

Loss of a mother, of her gaze, dismay at her lack of love, loss of connection – the river washes up narratives, details, drowned things in a place with a name that is never pronounced and then continues on its way. 

I had read and loved Krisztina Tóth’s prose, knew of her children’s books and was excited to get to know her poetry. With poet-translator George Szirtes showcasing a selection spanning five collections, you know you are in safe hands. His insightful translator’s introduction to the book provides invaluable context. Although one of Hungary’s internationally acclaimed writers, Krisztina Tóth is no longer able to live in her homeland owing to the repressive climate fostered by the government of Viktor Orbán. Tóth has been subjected to hate attacks, whipped up against her by those with power as the government effectively controls all major forms of communication. It is perhaps not surprising then to find a sense of displacement running through her work. Sorrow, frustration, rage, humour, desire follow on its heels. 

Krisztina Tóth’s writing is often plain, her tone matter of fact. This is the surface she creates, sometimes crafted with rhyme, through which break memories and emotions. In “Lover’s Dream” it is a woman’s rage against the smugness of a domineering man (and patriarchy itself) which erupts grotesquely. However it is his children who are sacrificed, Medea style: So then I cut off their heads and arranged them all/carefully in clean bottles with faces to the front/on either side of the marble steps … There is the horror experienced in “Gumtree” by the woman trying to buy a small doll like the one her daughter has lost and discovering the world of sex-toy dolls with a terrified face designed for men: 

There was, said the advertisement, a choice
of three colours for hair and more for eyes,
with three welcome accommodating slits,
vagina length six inches, fluids provided.

She mourns this “doll” as she mourns the innocence of girls and young women objectified in this way, contained by: The cardboard coffin containing childhood.

Ordinary life is strange, disturbing. People resell their dead relatives’ beds (“Hourglass”). A camera grimly observes powerless battery hen chicks (“Camera”). In frustration with a poor line, the poet uncovers a Mermaid barbie with a crushed head stuck head-first in the ground in bushes near a car park (“Duration”). She doesn’t know what to do. Should she rescue it or leave it so it might grow a little/each night like a scar, blonde, mutant carrot? Either way it is a hopeless situation and nothing she can do will make a difference. This helplessness is there too in the face of an animal’s suffering (“Dog”) alongside fury and resignation at her lover’s equal helplessness – or is it his lack of understanding? 

Love is present most strongly through absence. Poems begin in media res, telling understated, elliptical love stories: It’s been like this a while, you said (“Barrier”). In “Tourist” the focus is the town/you did not visit with me … – disappointment and loneliness deftly captured by the image of the single chocolate laid out on a double hotel bed. A city is defined by the broken promise of the person supposed to join the narrator (“Tyrannosaurus Rex”). She tramps through the city carrying a dinosaur backpack for her son. I waited for you a whole six million years, she tells the missing partner. Time too is measured in millennia, as befits dinosaurs. 

With tongue in cheek humour she writes about desire in “Ode to Men of Fifty,” their hair greying and their hands like their voices trembling on the phone. Hints of akasztofa humor, Hungarian hangman’s humour are mixed in with more poignant memories: No pain? Are you paying attention at all? (“Folder”). 

But it is not only individual experience which Krisztina Tóth writes about. She has a keen sense of our collective histories. The opening poem of this selection of her work is called “East European Triptych.” It begins with all of us from that part of the world: 

We are scared even at our own border
and are lost once past it, but we recognise
each other. Even on the far side of the world
we know each other by our sweat drenched clothes.

Although the poem culminates with one person’s experience, “Alina Moldova”‘s,  she is everywoman; any of us could be her. 

In the face of the frightening state of the world, it is not divinities who are invoked but the “Sleeper” below the surface of everything. In a more humorous poem, the poet searches in vain for the “Universal Adaptor” she regrets not buying. The secret life of the title of this selection (“Song of the Secret Life”), and one of my favourites, homes in all that is normally overlooked: My secret life is lived at the edge of your widening cornea. That life is ephemeral, caught in passing, lost and found by the poet, both invented and kept secret by her. This sense of the marginal is what makes her work so original. For Krisztina Tróth poetry begins not in the landscapes we might expect (“Where”), but:

... at the edge of the forest in rotting humus
Where somebody once was buried alive
That’s where the poem begins.

It is to language and poetry itself that she turns too in the final poem of this book, “Rainy Summer.” Here language flows river-like, whirring, rushing, carrying both her and her thoughts along, navigating by feel, combining absence and presence, some of each. It haunts her with its unending sentence filling her with consternation yet at the same time providing refuge.

Reviewed by Maria Jastrzębska 

MY SECRET LIFE. SELECTED POEMS

Written by Krisztina Tóth

Translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes

Published by Bloodaxe Books (2025)

March 2025 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

---

Maria Jastrzębska’s fifth full length poetry collection Small Odysseys was published by Waterloo Press in 2022. Previous collections include: At The Library Of Memories (2013, Waterloo Press) and The True Story of Cowboy Hat and Ingénue (2018, Cinnamon Press). Her selected poems were translated into Polish by Wioletta Grzegorzewska, Anna Błasiak and Paweł Gawroński, and into Romanian by Lidia Vianu. She translated Justyna Bargielska’s The Great Plan B (2017, Smokestack) and co-translated Elsewhere by Iztok Osojnik with Ana Jelnikar. She has co-edited various anthologies, among them Queer in Brighton (New Writing South 2014) with Anthony Luvera. She was the writer for Snow Q, an ACE awarded cross-arts project 2018/2020 which included performances of her poetry and filmpoems.

Read Maria Jastrzebska’s #RivetingReview of FOREST HEART by Tiziano Fratus

Read Maria Jastrzebska’s #RivetingReview of MAGNIFICATION FORTY by Tsvetanka Elenkova