Gábor G Gyukics is one of the most peculiar figures of Hungarian literary life. He is a poet who is migrating through countries and languages. He stands alone,
quite without echoes in the relatively closed tradition of Hungarian poetry. This is partly because, although he began to write poems in Hungarian, he was not living in Hungary.

The features of his art were shaped during his one and half decades spent as a political refugee living in America, far away from developments in Hungary during this period.

He left Hungary in 1986 and after two years in the Netherlands he settled in America-or more exactly he migrated in America, since he spent several years, weeks or just days in different places—years in San Francisco and Brooklyn with many briefer stops in between. American English became his second poetic language, so his poetic image has been shaped much more by the traditions of American beat and jazz poets he felt kinship with than literary memories brought from his native Hungary. The structure of his free poems evokes Ezra Pound’s Vorticism, which assigns a special status to poetic image. According to this concept, the “image” is essentially a special moment, when an “external and objective thing is transformed into something or penetrates something, which is internal and subjective”. These haiku-like image-moments are placing ordinary objects, things in refraction, depriving them of their familiarity, but giving them a unique freshness.

Orsolya Rákai