WINNER OF THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE

Poetry Book Society Choice

George Szirtes came to England as an eight-year-old refugee after the Hungarian uprising. His two Bloodaxe selections The Budapest File and An English Apocalypse bring together his poems on Hungarian and English themes. In his new collection, Reel, the exile’s obsessive quest for the nature of humane truth is the focus of poems of visionary sweep which pan out across a life.

Memory is film in Reel: a film-crew shoot Budapest for Berlin; faces float like light on the sea; names appear and disappear on a search engine. George Szirtes reconstructs childhood from a confusion of memories, photographs and stories in which men and women change places and fathers multiply. There are sequences on love, desire and illusion, poems about political loyalties, and poems that form ghost texts shadowing other writers.

‘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

‘Szirtes is increasingly revealed as a major English poet – one of those in whom insight and technique combine to focus more and more productively as the years go by’ – Hugh Macpherson, Poetry Review

‘The calm clarity of his poetry is classical in the only worthwhile sense: that it gives lasting utterance to experiences which poetry must engage with if it is to speak in dead earnest to the betrayed world’ – John Lucas, New Statesman