New & Collected Poems, George Szirtes
by John Taylor

from Antioch Review, Fall 2009

Every now and then during the past three decades, I have come across a poem by George Szirtes in a literary magazine and, after reading it, been left in a state of marvel; or in a meditative mood; and with the urge to read more poems; yet.... What I am trying to say—and you may have experienced this with other writers who long remain amiable strangers for you, smiling knowingly as they stroll by yet once again vanishing around the corner—is that I have always been delighted to read anything by this Hungarian-born British poet, but that I had, paradoxically, never gone to the trouble of procuring his collections, even those that considerably increased his reputation in the United Kingdom in the 1990s and thereafter: Blind Field (1994), Portrait of My Father in an English Landscape (1998), An English Apocalypse (2001), or Reel (2004), which won the T. S. Eliot Prize.

I can offer some lame justification for this long period of passive admiration: my critical "specialization," which is a chosen love, keeps my nose in foreign literature. But this is no true excuse, for Szirtes is also a "foreign poet" who was indeed forced to flee with his family to Great Britain at the age of eight, after the 1956 Hungarian uprising against the Soviet Union. A snapshot tells all: "My father carries me across a field. / It's night and there are trenches filled with snow. / Thick mud. We're careful to remain concealed //  From something frightening I don't yet know. / And then I walk and there is space between / The four of us. We go where we have to go.... "

His mother tongue was thus Hungarian, not the English whose teeming vocabulary and tempting rhymes he then mastered at school and in which he has always written his subtle, funny-sad verse with all its vivid observations about the world in his midst (and, yes, in his memory). While citing a decisive poem ("Short Wave," 1984) in which he turns a radio dial and ponders the languages coming to him from all over Europe, he has described his own awareness of himself as an ambivalent "English poet" and, beginning in the 1980s, his élan "towards something I seem to have desired ever more urgently without quite knowing it. What was it? The easy answer would be 'identity,' but it was not so much my personal or cultural identity I wanted to discover—I was then, and remain, sceptical about any notion of identity that has a fixed locatable centre—as ... an amalgam of reality-sense and historical-sense."

Keep these notions in mind, for they outline a poetics implying responsibilities toward language, literature, human society (or a given people), and especially other individuals—in any event not mere self-seeking—and digging well below the "roots" that less meditated poetic projects attempt to recover or lament. I will come back to this seriousness at the core of Szirtes's droll, lively, visual, yet also sometimes oneiric poetry, but I am impatient to introduce him a little more precisely; he made a first return visit to Hungary in 1984

... as a result of which I found myself becoming an English poet with a Hungarian past, or, to be more accurate, a fully baptized but increasingly residual-Christian (to use Peter Porter's phrase) English poet with a Jewish Hungarian past. ... What was it I fell into? Buildings and streets and bullet holes in walls, the world of the missing and a clutch of dead relatives, not to mention the long-buried, not-quite-forgotten, shadow language that I began to speak again and from which I started to translate.

Szirtes in fact subsequently produced excellent versions of work by Hungarian poets such as Imre Madách, Sándor Csoóri, István Vas, Ottó Orbán, Zsuzsa Rakovszky, and especially Ágnes Nemes Nagy (whose The Night of Akhenaton I reviewed in these pages—another of my unexpected encounters with him). He places her very high in twentieth-century European poetry and remarks in a tribute: "Between Beckett and Rilke was the position she craved: / her diction was clear as spring water in sentences / simple and natural, referring to but beyond the senses. / Will-power held them together. Her images were engraved // or scratched (more physical this) into the ice ... " (Remember that "referring to but beyond the senses" when you are reading Szirtes's own poems.)

These and the other Hungarian writers (like the sardonic prose master Dezso Kosztolanyi) whom he has rendered for us form a precious legation representing a remarkably rich literature. Even as the essentially selfless chore of translation has surely enhanced Szirtes's own verse (which often pays homage to or is dedicated to fellow Hungarian, English, or other poets), a sort of generosity and friendliness emanates from his personal oeuvre. By the way, one of his most moving poems is a seven-part sequence that was written upon W. G. Sebald's death: "On ungritted roads motorists were swerving /  to avoid each other. Nothing had come to bits / in the houses of the whole and the wholly deserving, // nothing was incomprehensible or beyond our wits / and I myself was taking a quiet stroll / in the nearby fields when I met Austerlitz.  // It was some way off the road and he was the sole / patch of dark in the bright mid-afternoon. / Hello, Max, I said. And he looked up with that droll / melancholy expression.... "

You will have understood that the 520 finely printed pages of Szirtes's magnificent New & Collected Poems have agreeably weighted down my bedside table, and my chest, for several weeks now. In this, I have not obeyed my maternal grandmother, an avid reader in Idaho for some eighty years, who maintained that one's bedtime (but not daytime) reading should be selected exclusively from books as light as possible—paperback whodunnits; yet if Szirtes's tome weighs nearly a kilo, its poems are often eminently suitable to the quiet of night, when one can muse with him on how Time was once "forever in an endless Now / Except in dreams, anxieties, and school." Remembering my grandmother, I should add that some shadowy figures who seem to have stepped out of spy or detective novels also crop up in his verse.

This Collected might have been even bigger. Not everything is republished from his previous volumes, and The Burning of the Books, a new collection of "longer work—sequences, experiments, more sustained voyages in that or that leaky craft," as the author depicts it, is announced by Bloodaxe for the fall of 2009. But this book is already very much of a monument; or more accurately (for this poet hardly takes himself seriously in such ways), a vast maze in which it is pleasant and stimulating to get lost for a very long time, all the while not really wanting to chance upon the exit. Here I wax metaphorical, as Szirtes also does at times, but in him digressions are shortcuts to clarity (or clearings) amid the dark thicket of facts. And if there seems to be some surrealism in his similes, I wonder, on second thought, if his quite startling analogies—which are also somehow understated—do not more directly derive from Eastern European humor, in which unsettling coincidences and juxtapositions occur in the normal course of events. At any rate, Szirtes sketches life as being as dreamy as sensate, sensual, down-to-earth, down to the "flesh" —as a key sequence of family poems phrases it.

I have already suggested some senses of "foreignness" that are at once related to and surpass our geographical and linguistic origins. This brings me at last to Szirtes's aforementioned concept of "reality-sense." English is a language well equipped for empiricism or perhaps—if you prefer to envision the egg coming before the chicken—empiricism unsurprisingly came into being because it was fostered by such a language. In contrast French, with which Szirtes, a reader of Roland Barthes, seems well acquainted (for he likes to cite French words, and he cites them correctly), is not as equipped for what one might call an empirical poetics: its qualities (like the weaknesses of English) lie elsewhere. I am myself not equipped to speak about high-precision fact-naming in Hungarian, but what strikes the reader of The Slant Door (1979), The Photographer in Winter (1986), and Bridge Passages (1991)—to quote the revealing titles of three earlier collections—is that Szirtes is a gifted observer of details that are "given" to him, of what he himself calls, via French, "données":

I woke to find a donnée in the form
of four white pigeons ranged about two black
of the façade of a demolished house.
Their symmetry was disturbing, held me back
from putting pen to paper, rightly so;
rightly so, except that hills of brick
lay curiously scattered on one side
and window-frames and jambs, and lintels thick
as thighs were spread-eagled behind them.
The smashed roof-beams and door panels, the boards
that used to hold the darkness in before,
now offered glimpses, if no more, of sash-cords,
plaster, wallpaper, some broken glass
from kitchen cupboards; little human stuff
that had for years been hidden in the hulks
those houses had become....

The philosophically resonant French word donnée, gently odd in this context, already underscores or "sets up"—as a comic might set up a punch line: ordinary words that will be heard otherwise—a different, more distant, rapport to reality. The poet has just awakened, but the rapport is not immediate, not seamless; there is a small but significant gap. In other words, Szirtes often establishes, or expresses, a not genuinely realistic relationship to the perceptible facts facing him; he subtly emphasizes a sort of hiatus or apartness that enables the facts, once they appear in the poem, to shine forth for us more brightly as well as more disturbingly. The same effect obtains in his many poems about photography, an art reminding us, perhaps even more than realistic schools of painting (and Szirtes first trained as an artist), that we are strictly remote from the reality that we are trying to render. His verse therefore perturbs (and amuses) because the reader senses how strange, funny, or foreign the world of facts can be; how strangely facts have been arranged by an invisible hand, even if with apparent naturalness. I would like to say: with a foreign matter-of-factness. In a thematically characteristic poem set in Jerusalem, Szirtes sums all this up much more lucidly by simply noting that the "air" of the city is "crowded with unreconciled / facts: dust, light, insects, birds, sheer noise, / the plants' upward drive, their fates sealed // while they blossom with disturbing poise," and then by adding that the air is likewise "thick / with the noise of the past, so it is hard to see / what [the world] is made of." Little matter that this is Jerusalem: our cities are also like this; as are our small towns, villages, hamlets, solitary farms, and tents in the wilderness.

This recalls his second concept or poetic goal, that of a "historical sense." Szirtes's post-1984 sojourns in Hungary, his friendships with and long translator's labors over the work of Hungarian poets, and his endless meditation on the meaning of his life taken specifically of course—as we all do when we look in the mirror—but also, and most importantly for poetry, as a harrowingly concrete archetype: that of a Hungarian Jewish boy whose parents (but by no means all the other family members) miraculously escaped the Holocaust, and then miraculously escaped from Communism. Szirtes has written numerous moving poems about his ancestors, his parents, his former acquaintances, and what he discovered, and rediscovered, once he was able to return to the homeland and look around. His impressive sequences of sonnets (or poems in other fixed forms), with their psychological insights that take on intricacy with each new added piece, show how profoundly he has reflected on his childhood in both Hungary and Great Britain, and from both the child's and the retrospecting adult's point of view. 'The shoes that I polished are under a desk and the fingers / I checked for dirt are spread on the desktop," he notes; "The dead years / are always available, just open the desklid .... " In that desk are familial and familiar particulars that speak to us as if we, too, were their owners. Szirtes's autobiographical inclinations, combined with his "historical sense," constantly highlight universals.

However, in comparison to many contemporary writers who have experienced the horrors of Nazism or Communism, Szirtes has not foresworn all optimism. He is rather singular in that his life-work forms a continuum of thoughts and emotions that does not exclude a desire to affirm: some family stories recounted in verse are understandably sinister, and even more forcible because of the faux-frivolous tone ("And as for grandfather, he was dead, alas, / The socialist playwright of the shop-floor / Swept off to Auschwitz in a cloud of gas"); yet other narratives are redeeming in their candid intimacy, in their celebration of happiness, as in a sequence called "Forgetting," in which the poet conjures up kinds of bliss that we can never remember as an adult: "The first hand coming down from heaven. Her hand. / She hovers above you. It is a premonition / Of life to come, a bird preparing to land. //  Your mother's warmth. Her breasts. An impression / Of intensity as softness, and then the bones / Of her knuckles. Chests. Neck. The motion // Of her head, swing of her hips. The delicate cones of her nipples. The mystery of the navel. Heat. / Cold, Wet. Dry. Milky smells and pheromones. // Where do you begin?... "

Where do we begin?—not only then, but now. Where and how can we re-begin? Time and again, this is our dilemma. Szirtes is fully aware of the fragility of human society, and has often pointed to it; he is haunted by nightmares and intimations of catastrophes. Note how tensely "The Dream Hotel" begins: "As if the sea were entering through the window, / it was that close.... " But rarely do his poems (in which a graceful musicality can convey grave, mysterious, or ominous subject matter) lack touching moments that offer hope, if only brief hopes; doomed hopes perhaps, but hopes nonetheless. Consider how "The Dream Hotel" ends: "You hear the sea again. / It is still far off, a slowly approaching train / down a long tunnel that leads to the hotel  / and the two lovers, just as his lips touch hers." As if it were still possible, even in our age, to whisper a yes now and then to all those roaring "no's" (to paraphrase Dante).

About the Author
John Taylor is an American writer who has lived in France since 1977. His most recent book of prose and poetry is The Apocalypse Tapestries (Xenos). He has published a two-volume collection of essays, Paths to Contemporary French Literature (Transaction). Transaction has just released his new collection, Into the Heart of European Poetry, which includes several critical essays first published in the Antioch Review.

Antioch Review
Antioch University

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