On the occasion of Hungarian Poetry Day, the ELTE ULA Savaria Library and Archives hosted a special literary event: the presentation of Szauer Ágoston’s poetry volume Behind All Things (Mindenek mögött), held in a ceremonial yet intimate atmosphere. The event served at once as a literary encounter, a return, and a dialogue – between poetry and reader, teacher and student, the visible world and that which lies beyond it.
The discussion was moderated by Szauer Dániel, the poet’s son and a university student, giving the evening a particularly personal framework. Rather than offering a conventional literary-historical analysis, the conversation unfolded through attentive, personal questions, revealing both the author’s career and his poetic approach. Szauer Ágoston spoke about his beginnings as a poet, the interplay between prose and poetry in his work, as well as the internal and editorial processes behind the creation of the new volume.
Behind All Things brings together poems with a spiritual and transcendent focus: short, densely composed texts that balance on the threshold of expressibility while probing the presence of existence beyond the visible. The audience learned that the book is conceived as a thematic selection, in which earlier and newly written poems come together to form a coherent whole.
The poems, selected and sensitively performed by Zoltán Kelemen, actor of the Weöres Sándor Theatre, intertwined and resonated as living speech. Musical contributions were provided by Marcell Kardos, a university student, and the audience also heard a musical adaptation of one of the poems from the volume, Sphere (Szféra).
The book launch was not only a celebration of a new poetry collection, but also a demonstration of how poetry can become dialogue – across generations, artistic disciplines, and ways of thinking. At the end of the event, the author signed copies of the book, while participants continued the evening’s reflections in personal conversations.
