Poetry, to me, is the art of looking closely.
I am less interested in extraordinary moments than in those we are inclined to pass by without noticing: an empty garage, a magnolia tree, the edge of a lake, the first sentence spoken in an unfamiliar language. A poem begins when such ordinary scenes no longer ask to be explained, but simply to be attended to.
For me, attention is not merely an aesthetic principle but a way of relating to other people. I believe that careful observation is also a form of respect: an acknowledgement that we can never fully possess a landscape, an object, or another human being. A poem, therefore, does not seek to close the world with conclusions, but to leave it open.
The books presented here were written at different stages of my life, yet they are united by the same curiosity. Nature, memory, family histories, belonging and estrangement, and the movement between languages all return, in one way or another, to the same question: how can we remain fully present in the world while preserving our capacity for wonder?
I do not believe that poems offer answers. Rather, they create a space in which silence, uncertainty and the unsayable are allowed to exist. If, after reading a poem, someone looks differently—even for a moment—at a tree, a street, or an encounter with another person, then the poem has already fulfilled its purpose.
The books and selected publications presented here mark different stages of a journey that is still unfolding.
Books and excerpts
You can order the e-books at Amazon world wide and leave me a review. In the name of all poets in the world, I thank you for your interest.
The Unseen Archive
The Unseen Archive is a collection of poems that asks what we carry without knowing it—in the body, in the blood, in the quiet repetitions that pass from one generation to the next. These poems move through family memory, illness, migration, landscape and the lives of animals and plants, tracing the invisible ways in which experience is carried forward through gestures, language, touch and care.
Yet this is not simply a book about memory or inheritance. It is a book about attention—and about the quiet responsibility of seeing. Again and again, ordinary things—a stone pigeon on a rooftop, a sleeping face, an old wardrobe, a fishing lake at dawn, a cat watching a caterpillar, a stranger reading in the shade—become the starting point for acts of patient looking. Rather than turning the world into metaphor, these poems allow people, animals and places to remain fully themselves, trusting that meaning emerges not through explanation but through sustained presence. What is overlooked, dismissed or almost forgotten is patiently brought back into view.
Moving between Hungary and elsewhere, between childhood and later life, the poems reveal how the body remembers what the mind has filed away, and how language can recover what seemed lost. They suggest that what shapes us is rarely the dramatic event, but the repeated act of looking, listening, waiting and returning. The familiar becomes strange enough to be noticed, and, through attention, familiar enough to be loved.
Written with emotional precision and remarkable restraint, The Unseen Archive invites readers into a slower way of seeing. These poems do not ask what things mean; they ask what becomes visible if we remain with them long enough. In doing so, they offer not only an archive of memory, but a way of inhabiting the world.
My heartfelt thanks to Isabelle Kenyon, CEO of Fly on the Wall Press for her thoughtful editing and invaluable advice.
First Names Only
First Names Only is a collection of poems about encounter. Set in refugee camps, classrooms, waiting rooms, city streets and ordinary landscapes, these poems look beyond headlines and political debate to the quiet moments in which people begin to see one another as individuals. A shared meal, a swimming lesson, a photograph on a mobile phone, the smell of cardamom, a conversation interrupted by memory—each poem offers a meeting rather than a judgement.
At the heart of the collection are portraits: Rashid waiting in line before dawn while scrolling through photographs of home; Sāra carrying her father’s love of French poetry across languages and borders; Abdallāh stepping into a lake for the first time; Rana measuring time by the hands of an old watch; Katerina dragging her suitcase through the city after being thrown out by her boyfriend; Dmytro tending a public garden that has quietly become his own. Their stories are not presented as symbols of a crisis but as singular lives, each marked by ordinary gestures, difficult choices, humour, longing and resilience.
Written with restraint and close attention, the poems refuse easy sentiment or simplified narratives. Instead, they linger over objects, conversations and everyday acts of care: folding paper boats from a language textbook, sharing cherries on a park bench, buying a croissant, pulling ivy from a garden, watching cigarette tips glow in the dark. Again and again, the collection suggests that belonging is shaped not only by memory but by language, work, friendship and the fragile routines of daily life.
Moving between cultures, languages and histories, First Names Only explores the space where strangers gradually become neighbours, teachers, friends or family. It asks what it means to look without presuming, to listen without demanding, and to accompany another person without claiming to possess their story. The poems do not seek to explain displacement or speak on behalf of those they portray. They recognise that every encounter remains partial, that some experiences resist translation, and that silence can be as truthful as speech.
Compassionate without sentimentality, First Names Only invites readers to move beyond labels and meet people one by one. It is a book about first names, because a first name is often all we are given—and all we need to begin seeing another person.
‘In this tender and sensitive collection, Szilvia bears witness to, and listens deeply to the experiences of refugees and asylum seekers. These are poems of liminal spaces, of yearning, of longing – both to feel home, but also to feel understood. These are poems which promote empathy and seek to soften the harshness of borders, leaving just the stories of ordinary – and wonderful – people.’ – Isabelle Kenyon, CEO of Fly on the Wall Press.
Excerpts from the poems
