Oxford Poets S.
5 total works
George Szirtes previous collections The Photographer in Winter and Metro explored the European past, including that of his own family. Bridge Passages , much of which was written in Budapest during the momentous December of 1989, deals mainly with the present, and looks at the lives that are lived in private flats and public streets, and of the dissolving of individuals in large events. The title set of poems forms an intermittent diary which responds to the changing moods of Hungary as it was caught up in the tide sweeping across Eastern Europe, while other sections recall his English childhood, and contain translations of works by leading Hungarian poets Ott 'o Orb 'an and Agnes Nemes Nagy. This book is intended for poetry readers.
This Selected Poems , made by the poet himself, from a period of at least twenty years, includes poems from all seven of George Szirtes' published poetry books, several of which are now unavailable. His three major sequences, 'The Photographer in Winter', 'Metro', and a slightly revised 'Transylvana', are included in full. Szirtes has built up a reputation as an energetic and skilful translator from Hungarian, including the poems of Zsuzsa Rakovszky for OUP (1994). He is a brilliant, austere poet in his own right, wielding English with the particular skill, strangeness, and originality of a poet who has made the language his own from the time he came to England as a child. Lachlan McKinnan once described him as a 'sad, funny, humane aesthete' and this remains a true description. This book is intended for poetry readers.
A collection of poems by the Hungarian, George Szirtes, born in Budapest in 1948. The author has lived in England since 1956, when he came as refugee, and now does regular tours of the country reading his poetry. Although new to the Oxford University Press, Szirtes is an established poet and his first book "The slant door" was joint winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for 1980.
The term `Blind Field' refers to photography, and in this, George Szirtes's seventh collection, photographic themes supply the starting points for a number of poems of almost surrealistic dislocation. These give way at the end to a group of more warmly affectionate, personal poems. The centre of the book is occupied by a long work, Transylvana , in which the poet revisits his mother's former home in Romania and depicts the life of an unnamed relative in that country's still ominous political climate. On Bridge Passages (Oxford Poets, 1991): `Trained as a painter, Szirtes uses what can be seen...as a moral key, combining a dizzy metamorphic imagination with formal strictness.' Sean O'Brien, Sunday Times `Szirtes zigzags his way to greatness.' Richard Burns, Jewish Chronicle This book is intended for readers of contemporary poetry.
This text includes, among other poems, linked sonnets. They are about childhood, language, and growing up in a foreign country - England - and particularly they are about the author's own father, captured in images, anecdotes, and sudden, vivid fragmentary stories. The bravura formal structure of these remarkable sequences continues Szirtes' tradition of writing long poem sequences, and contributes to his personal history of Europe. George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948, and came to England as a refugee after the 1956 Hungarian revolution. He was educated and lived in England ever since. At present he lives in Norfolk with his artist wife Clarissa Upchurch, and is in charge of the writing course at the Norwich School of Art & Design.