Best Sellers:

Best Sellers:

Best Sellers:

Best Sellers:

Bad Machine | Bloodaxe Books
Bad Machine

George Szirtes

Bad Machine

George Szirtes

Publication Date : 24 Jan 2013

ISBN: 9781852249571

Pages: 65
Size :216 x 138mm
Rights: World

Shortlisted for the 2013 T.S. Eliot Prize

Poetry Book Society Choice

The body is the ‘bad machine’ of George Szirtes’ latest book of poems. The sudden death of his elderly father and of his younger friend, the poet Michael Murphy, remind him how machines – sources of energy and delight in their prime – go so easily wrong; and that change in the body is a signal for moving on.

But language too is a body. Here, politics, assimilation, desire, creatureliness and the pleasure and loss of the body, mingle in various attenuated forms such as lexicon, canzone, acrostics, mirror poems, postcards, and a series of ‘minimenta’ after Anselm Kiefer whose love of history as rubble and monument haunts this collection.

George Szirtes is one of our most inventive – and constantly reinventing – poets, and Bad Machine shows him developing new themes and new ways of writing in poems which stretch the possibilities of form and question language and its mastery.

‘A brilliantly virtuosic collection of deeply felt poems concerned with the personal impact of the dislocations and betrayals of history. The judges were impressed by the unusual degree of formal pressure exerted by Szirtes on his themes of memory and the impossibility of forgetting’ – Douglas Dunn, on Reel, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize.

‘A major contribution to post-war literature…Using a painter-like collage of images to retrieve lost times, lives, cities and betrayed hopes, Szirtes weaves his personal and historical themes into work of profound psychological complexity’ – Anne Stevenson, Poetry Review.

'Any new collection from George Szirtes will treat its readers to a unique poetic combination: immense versatility and virtuosity when it comes to form, but also a tireless sympathy that dwells clear-sightedly on shocks, traumas and hard-won renewals from a century of migration and massacre. This volume has typically strong-voiced sequences...But its title sequence truly takes the breath away: a meditation on the love and hatred of knowledge, and why fury against literature did not start or end on Nazis' pyres... Read Szirtes to feel the exquisite, excruciating paper cuts of history' - Boyd Tonkin, The Independent, on The Burning of the Books and other poems.

 

George Szirtes: 'Metro'

George Szirtes reads two extracts from his long poem-sequence 'Metro' from his New & Collected Poems. This film is from the DVD-book In Person: 30 Poets, filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce, edited by Neil Astley, which includes several poems read by George Szirtes from his New & Collected Poems.

 

Ireland: Click here to order from Books Upstairs in Dublin

USA: Click here to order from Indiebound or Bookshop.org

  

BOOKS BY George Szirtes

Collected Poems

Freda Downie

Collected Poems

Publication Date : 29 Jun 1995

Read More   amazon.co.uk
The Night of Akhenaton

Ágnes Nemes Nagy

The Night of Akhenaton

Selected Poems

Publication Date : 27 Jan 2004

Read More   amazon.co.uk
Fortinbras at the Fishhouses

George Szirtes

Fortinbras at the Fishhouses

Responsibility, the Iron Curtain and the sense of history as knowledge: Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures

Publication Date : 25 Mar 2010

Read More   amazon.co.uk
Fresh Out of the Sky

George Szirtes

Fresh Out of the Sky

Publication Date : 21 Oct 2021

Read More   amazon.co.uk

RELATED BOOKS

New & Collected Poems
The Burning of the Books and other poems
Reading George Szirtes
cart
CART
search
TITLE SEARCH

A-Z

AUTHORS

A-Z

CATEGORIES

View Larger Text