An apple is an apple  August Kleinzahler    • Eternal Monday:
New and Selected Poems by György Petri, translated by Clive
Wilmer     Bloodaxe, 96 pp, £7.95, June 1999, ISBN 1 85224 504 2
György Petri (or Petri György, as he would have been called in
Hungary) was born in Budapest in 1943 to a family with a Serbian
and Jewish background. A year after Petri’s birth, in 1944,
Hungary joined the Axis powers with disastrous result. The war
impoverished the country and brought in its wake the Stalinist
regime of Mátyás Rákosi, who was briefly replaced by Imre Nagy
(the subject of a moving Petri poem), only for him to be
followed the next year by the quisling János Kádár, who arrived
back in Hungary in 1956 along with the Soviet tanks.  You are
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