Happy New Year, my golden father!

Who writes landscape poems these days? For example, David Jóna. Dare to be out of date. While in his poems he maintains a continuous dialogue with his poet predecessors, János Pilinszky, Jenő Dsida, Attila József, Endré Ady, and Lőrinc Szabó, he also regularly brings into play the works of contemporary poets. It dares to be serious, even infinitely sad, and it does not shy away from frivolously mixing registers. But humor is not far from him either: he formulates social criticism in such a way, for example in the poem Slang, that we laugh with our mouths full. In the Siege Diary series, he captures situations familiar to all of us from the world of quarantine, death and impossible, absurd situations of recent years. Being a practicing dieter myself and a lover of poetry, I can't stop copying his dieting recipe here: "I should lose weight / not increase my butt / I've decided that with Nutella / I won't eat any more bread." Dávid Jóna flouts the rules or transforms them, but perhaps that is what makes his writing so refreshing. What he states in the poem The 564th Day of the Siege is also true of his poetry: "I follow the rules. Even if I turn around on a double closing line, I still index." So, we're not crazy: the poem is coming full speed ahead to hit us. (Krzztina Tóth)