The Iron-Blue Vault: Selected Poems

Attila József is Hungary’s greatest modern poet. His extraordinary poetry is exhilarating in its power, transcending the scars of a difficult life. Born into poverty in 1905, deserted by his father and put out to fostering, József had a brutalised childhood, and tried to poison himself at the age of nine. Mostly self-educated, he was prosecuted at 18 for blasphemy in a poem, and expelled from university a year later for With a Pure Heart, a now celebrated poem which spoke for a whole genera...