Ecological imperatives in contemporary Hungarian poetry

Abstract

Abstract The study reviews from an ecopoetic point of view the tendencies in Hungarian poetry of recent years that emphasise the biopoetic aspects of existence. László Lázár Lövétei’s eclogues, for example, renew the discourse from the perspective of the ancient tradition, while Tamás Korpa and Mátyás Sirokai transform the reader’s mental consciousness by focusing on the plant life, and in doing so, reassess and rethink the concept of being embedded in nature. For example, Gábor Dávid Németh combines the mechanisms of cultural memory, the ecosystems of environmental awareness and the plant metaphor system arising from the organicity of language. Gábor Mezei approaches the question from the perspective of hybridity. Besides blurring the traditional boundaries of body and self, these authors also exploit the subversive, resistant character of ecopoetics, not once asserting the principle of what they call the ecopoetic imperative whose topological, tropological, entropological and ethnological dimensions are worth exploring.