Reading Liesl Ujvary’s marvellous 1977 poetry collection Good and Safe brought to mind William Carlos Williams’ words from his essay introducing The Wedge: “A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.” These poems, translated from the German by Ann Cotten and Anna-Isabelle Dinwoodie with a foreword by Fatima Naqvi, operate like machines just as Williams suggested. They loop, repeat, permutate, interlock, and when an “I” eventually shows up, it is a disassociated one.

The overall effect of the poems invites reflection on identity, perception, and the forces that shape our understanding of ourselves and society. Strikingly, the collection does all this with a playful sense of humour.

Liesl Ujvary (b. 1939, Bratislava) grew up in Austria and earned a PhD in Zurich in 1968 after studies in Slavic, Hebraic, and art history. She taught in Tokyo (1969–70) and then spent a year in Moscow (1970–71) in an advanced training program for Russian teachers. In the mid-1970s, she edited and translated an anthology of Soviet poets after she smuggled some of the work out of Russia. She has lived in Vienna since 1971 as an experimental multimedia artist.

In 1977, when this collection first appeared, half of Europe lay under the shadow of the Soviet Union while social unrest rocked the West. Ujvary’s poems reflect that tense world through both her chosen forms and their content.

Good and Safe gains even more relevance in our current Trumpian post-truth era. As Monica Rinck writes in her blurb, “I would even say it’s the book of the hour.” Today’s unchecked government misinformation, AI-generated content, and social media as the primary source of (dis)information raise concerns similar to those Ujvary explored in 1977. That was also a time when truth-bending propaganda sought to shape collective identity and belief through repressive regimes, cultural dictates, or consumerist capitalism.

The collection is described as concrete poetry. I had expected shape poems, reflecting my naïve view of the concrete school. But digging deeper, I discovered that Eugen Gomringer, a pioneer of the movement, coined the term denkgegenstanddenkspiel (“thought-object thought-play”) as a core principle. Rather than relying on visual shape, Ujvary enacts denkgegenstanddenkspiel through verbal concreteness, using a dynamic interplay of words and form that requires the reader to complete each poem’s meaning.

We can see why this collection remains relevant nearly fifty years later by examining how its sections operate. The first few poems instruct us how to read the whole. The book opens its first section, What Holds the World Together, with this poem:

What Holds the World Together
Tough times — Weak knees
Full breasts — Empty pockets
Hot nights — Cold coffee
Sour grapes — Sweet life
Tight pants — Open hearts
Dear homeland — Cheap flights
Rich harvest — Poor suckers
Big prospects — Small fry
Thin soup — Thick air
Easy women — Heavy weapons
Bright minds — Shady business
Long fingers — Short trial
Old songs — New faces
Unsavory stories — Mellow wine

At first glance, these lines present a simple series of paired phrases in the pattern X — Y. Looking closer, each line follows an Adjective Noun — Adjective Noun structure. The adjectives are antonyms, as in “Tough/Weak,” or “Old/New.” The nouns are unconnected, as in “Times/Knees” or “Songs/Faces.”

As I read more about the concrete school, I came across Pedro Reis, a professor and scholar of avant-garde and concrete poetry. In Concrete Poetry: A Generic Perspective, he notes that concrete poetry “is characterized by the use of language in a reduced, condensed, and autonomous form, so that the poem becomes impersonal, without any trace of the author's presence in the text… [it] projects itself… as communicating its own materiality, the concretion of its own structure.”

I can see these effects in this poem, and how it is more than linguistic play. The pairings are sometimes idiomatic, often unexpected, and together they generate layered resonances. Tough times — Weak knees hints at fragility in the face of hardship, or perhaps reluctance to stand firm. The poem resists providing explanation as it offers no guiding voice, no speaker imposing meaning. Instead, it functions as a machine of words, a denkgegenstanddenkspiel, an object and a game of thought, where meaning arises through the readers’ engagement as we trace repetitions and contrasts.

Meaning accumulates across the whole. Sexual politics surface alongside economic and social tensions, and the idiomatic phrasing lends humour. Finally, the title pulls the poem together showing what holds the world together, where something gains while something else loses. That’s my interpretation, but yours may differ. The poem’s machine works to hand interpretive power to each reader.

The next four poems use pairings with an explicit hinge, each framed by their titles. Here is the first of the sequence.

this is better

democracy is better than dictatorship

butter is better than margarine

schools are better than military training camps

sex is better than booze

humans are better than computers

houses are better than barracks

poems are better than advertisements

students are better than cops

truth is better than lies

The full sequence of titles are: “this is better” “this is the same” “this has always been like this” “there will always be this.” Each poem in the sequence can be read down, pairing by pairing. But the sequence also invites us to read across, tracing a progression.

Reading across first lines we see: “Democracy is better than dictatorship,” “Democracy is like dictatorship,” “Democracy has always been like this,” “There will always be dictatorship.” These lines explore the familiar claim of democracy’s superiority, a claim which then collapses, step by step, into sameness, inevitability, and permanence. And this pattern repeats for each line in the first poem. As an example of the witty tone of the book, you can imagine the progression of a “sex is better than booze.”

Formally, the poems strip away the authority of the declarative voice. They do not argue but instead they arrange language so contradiction reveals itself. The reader traces the shift from optimism to fatalism. The critique emerges from structure, not from a speaker’s firm position as each poem is equally firm despite being contrary to the previous.

The rest of the first section continues to unsettle what we think is given, what we think we know, and keeps getting us to ask why we believe what we believe.

Section two, Do You Not Sense Anything?, opens with its eponymous poem, a series of short prose stanzas. The first, “The human body is covered in skin. The skin can be sliced open. Under the skin is . . . something.” Stanza after stanza closes with “is…something.” That repetition builds pressure. “Something” becomes both placeholder and weight. We never know if “something” names the same thing or a shifting subject. The title’s “anything” complicates matters further, the “do you not” logic has the question doubling back on itself. The poem’s syntax, rather than a speaker’s stance, produces unease.

The rest of the section ranges across forms and linkages, yet keeps circling the title’s demand: Do you not sense anything? The reader must decide what counts as “sense,” and whether the section’s “anything” amounts to knowledge or merely a feeling of almost-knowing.

Section three, Poems about Poems, now brings the “I” onstage and plays with it. We get iterations like subroutines with swapped variables such as: “autumn poem,” “insanity,” “poem,” “new poem,” “poem (for marxists),” Many are built from a single line repeated for effect. The section enacts machines within machines.

Section four, Novels about Novels, mixes prose poems and lineated pieces. The “I” appears again, but the ground never settles. The texts remain engaging and odd, taking novelistic gestures and staging them as lyric experiments.

Section five, I, begins to interrogate the “I” in a search for what is true about the self, how the self defines itself. For example this untitled poem:

I am a good person

this is true

I am a cold person

this is true

I am a sensitive person

this is true

I am an untidy person

this is true

I am an open person

this is true

The phrase “this is true”, has a feeling of a computer program or lie detector’s check of true or false on statements being made. There is a feeling of disassociation between the self and the part of the self doing the checking. The rest of the section’s poems shift mode but continue this exploration of the untethered “I”.

Section six, Autobiography with Instructions, the final section, looks most straightforward at first. Prose block poems give us data: “My name is Liesl Ujvary. I am 36 years old. I was born in Pressburg and have lived in Vienna for three years…” Below each block sits a series of bureaucratic prompts, the kind that generates those surface facts. We feel we are learning about the poet and her life, yet the information stays flat because the questions stay surface. Then comes a run of poems all titled “Out with it!” that subvert what came before, telling deeper stories untethered from questionnaires. What you thought you knew at first is almost meaningless without the full context.

We then get to the final poem of the section and book, “Sealed Object with List of Contents.” The sealed object is described as a small box containing only a list of contents, not the contents themselves. The poem humorously enumerates the varied list, including items such as pronouns, objects, ideology, even “the universe.” The book continues to demonstrate how limited our access to reality can be. At best, we approximate it with written lists of what we think it contains. There is playful irony in this poetry collection, full of lists, making a comment on listing as it closes.

By the end, it seemed clear to me that not only was each poem William’s machine, but that each section was, and the collection was. There is a movement from the opening without an “I,” where belief and identity are interrogated, toward a closing where the limits of bureaucratic self-description are exposed. The overall effect is built poem by poem, section by section.

Good and Safe can be described as satire. It is, in places. I found it funny, quirky, and playful. For example, sausages show up regularly. But I realized beneath the lightness runs a serious thesis, we can’t fully know why we believe what we believe, since belief and our sense of self is malleable. In a world where social media performance is mistaken for identity and politics are driven by image and spin, Ujvary’s Good and Safe shows us how our own sense of meaning can be made, and unmade, with language.