...you could go into a bookshop, open the book at random, and want to stay with it, keep reading. There is a sparkiness...

Not much time has to pass before it becomes history and is parcelled up into pre-this and post-that and whatever it was in between, as if it was programmed and readily digestible. Poets may be amenable to this filing system approach, or not, it's a chancy thing who happens to have been born when and where.

George Szirtes opens his introduction to New Order in this way. In case anyone has forgotten, he says, there was a peaceful revolution - a grand European revolution with global implications - exactly twenty years ago in 1989 though, if we have forgotten, it may be because we are still living in it.

In 1989 the Berlin wall came down. 1956, he goes on, was a bloody moment in Hungary. From the early 20th century key moments and movements can be tabulated.

Perhaps (an aside here) poetry has meant different things in different places but, in Britain, is there a poetry of 'the Thatcher years', did even the 'poetry of the two world wars' (to name it as such) crucially develop the art? Develop it how, and for whom? What's 'develop'?

Anyway, George Szirtes' Introduction makes a case and the anthology of twelve Hungarian poets is presented by way of illustrating post-1989 Hungary, not (he suggests) wholly assimilated into whatever it is European poetry may be becoming. And while establishing 1989 at the outset, he goes on to say, thirteen pages later, Poets are not primarily political commentators, of course,.. Well, yes.

For how the translations came about, it was a project organised jointly by the British Council and the Hungarian Cultural Centre that brought together a number of younger British and Hungarian poets for mutual translation that resulted in a pamphlet or chapbook called Converging Lines,... material from that brief anthology has been used here.' And I suppose (he doesn't say) more has been added to fill these 300 or so pages.

It seems likely more of the Hungarian poets spoke English than vice versa, and that the translations from the fourteen poets here came mostly from cribs.

The poems (the Hungarian on the left hand pages) are more alive in English than, and differently from, the Introduction allows them to be. I would guess that you could go into a bookshop, open the book at random, and want to stay with it, keep reading. There is a sparkiness, as if (as perhaps they did) the translations came as much out of conversation as from cribs. I have reported often (it seems often) my sense of translations having been stilted. This fat volume, not an Arc Visible poets but achieving that slogan's purpose better than when usually so labelled, and if a lively and different way with words and imagination and risk is to be brought into original English writing, here's a fine push towards it.