ABSTRACT
Are robust poems still written in America? This question will perhaps occur to other readers of Sándor Csoóri’s vigorous collection Before and After the Fall, vividly translated by Len Roberts. Born in 1930, Csoóri is a prolific Hungarian poet, essayist, and novelist who has distinguished himself by criticizing Hungarian society and politics both before and after the 1989 collapse of Communism (whence the title, which in some poems also seemingly alludes to a symbolic Eden).
