George Szirtes’s poetry is imbued with a sense of being both at home and in exile in England. Fascinated by the manners, landscapes and weather of his adopted home, Szirtes records them with great precision and affection, for example in the new poem Snowfield:

Snow takes form: the shapes it makes mount up

and vanish against sky, a paler more transcendent

cloud, a broader emptiness, briefly dependent

on whatever it clings to, fit for the hands to cup

and pack solid.

Snow invariably wakens something special in Szirtes; he is drawn to its transience, much as he is drawn to photography and film. Szirtes has made his artistic home from in-between moments and places, and New and Collected Poems presents the reader with a remarkably coherent symbolic world filled with windows, courtyards and trains.

Szirtes came to the UK as an eight-year-old refugee of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. His early work was rather dreamy and surreal; but a return visit to Hungary in 1984 brought a sharper focus to Szirtes’s perennial themes of memory and identity. A further breakthrough occurred when he embarked on a series of sonnet sequences. In one of his finest achievements, Portrait of My Father in an English Landscape, Szirtes describes his father as a living ghost, speaking himself into existence against the forces of history:

Yet there is something solid and spherical

about the figure I feel I have to build

into and out of language. He exhales

his own monument which hangs there, stilled

as the light which holds him but fails

to preserve the cells of wind that whistle through him

and could destroy his body at a whim.

Szirtes knows that to write a sonnet places him in a distinct tradition; but the liberties he takes with the form, and his use of the sonnet sequence, allow him to question and enrich that tradition. With their almost-refrains and near-repeated lines, Szirtes’s haunting sequences allow him to explore the shifts and faults in the cultural connections that he makes.

Cultural displacement can be fruitful for a poet; linguistic displacement is more difficult to manage. Occasionally, a Szirtes poem slips unexpectedly out of register or idiom, often in order to facilitate a rhyme, and there are moments when the language feels eerily unlived-in. But this is part of the distinctive texture of his poetry. In English Words, Szirtes tells us that “My first three English words were AND, BUT, SO: / they were exotic in my wooden ear...”, and he has retained this sense of the English language as something rich and strange.

History has taught Szirtes to be wary of fixity and absolutes, and he is most at home in moments of transformation, as when meticulous observation gives way to marvellous vision. Reading George Szirtes is published at the same time as New and Collected Poems. John Sears makes a convincing case for Szirtes’s aesthetic and political seriousness, and offers a valuable, sure-footed guide to the work of this important poet.

George Szirtes, New and Collected Poems, Bloodaxe, £15, 520pp

John Sears, Reading George Szirtes, Bloodaxe, £12, 245pp

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