Unknown Places

"Kntor shares with his fellow Central and Eastern European poets the destiny of being, unavoidably, a "political" poet of sorts. "The past," as he admits in his long, historically-infused poem, "Ancestors," "hangs from me." And yet his politics, to borrow a phrase coined by his Hungarian countryman Gyrgy Konrd, is pervasively an "antipolitics," a politics that stands back and observes - with a cold, knowing, and bemused eye - the vagaries and quotidian comi-tragedies of private life as it attempts to cope with and navigate the conundrums of public events and ideologies. In poems like "Learning to Live," for example, Kntor voices with a dry but caustically bitter humor worthy of Swift and Shaw - even of Beckett - the internal machinations of an intensely private man who must cope, howsoever mockingly and ironically, with the machinations of public ideologies and events... who must "learn to live" (the same life!) all over again.