|
English Studies Forum The Forum Reviews |
||
|
|
Poems in the Language of Life George Szirtes. Reel. Bloodaxe Books, 2004. 136pp. £8.95 (UK). By John Sears, Manchester Metropolitan University
George Szirtes has published nine collections of poetry since The Slant Door in 1979. Reel, his most recent, has won the 2004 T. S. Eliot prize, a commendation surely savoured by a poet who has often acknowledged his debts to Eliot, as well as to other poets in the modernist canon. Szirtes, Hungarian by birth but Anglicized by his family’s migration to London after the 1956 uprising, is also an accomplished translator of Hungarian prose and poetry and an editor of several significant anthologies, including Harvill’s recent Leopard V: An Island of Sound (2004).
His poetry has always explored his own experience, often expressed through as an uneasy, tentative but developing relationship to England and the English language, characterised by his own fondness for the metaphor of the “frozen.” In the ‘Preface’ to An English Apocalypse (2001) he comments on a post-war England characterised (as it was for so many Europeans) by sleeping in “icy sheets,” which “equalled Cold War.” History merges with personal, intimate experience in Szirtes, so much so that it’s sometimes pointedly difficult to separate the two. His “frozen images from a frozen time” repeatedly testify to the ways that poetry allows access to the grand movements of historical processes while, at the same time, affording the momentary luxury of aesthetic self-indulgence, the sensation of the “icy sheets” warming up.
Not that there’s anything obviously indulgent about Szirtes’ work, which tends towards an austere but deeply felt formalism. Reel, dedicated “To the ghost of childhood and the body of the adult,” lays its cards on the table in the opening title poem, an awakening to the noises of the poet’s native Budapest, “the collage of the overheard,” an image which combines auditory experience with the sights of the city in which “crimes / Committed in names they’re trying to forget” compete with poetry’s drive towards memory and recording that is the primary theme of the collection. “The city rhymes,” we’re told, “With its imperial neighbour”: in the poem’s conceit, relating the filming of Budapest as Berlin to the potential for all cities to contain a shared symbolic history, the language of poetry finally overrides the visual. The poem’s terza rima form, elaborated throughout the collection, establishes Dante’s descent amongst the shades as a major mythic paradigm here (the familiar modern trope of the city as Hell), ambiguously marked in the poem’s last line: “The filming goes on somewhere in the shade,” outshone by the poem’s verbal creativity.
History, memory, tradition, the self and its experiences thus constitute the bases from which Szirtes explores the roles that poetry can play in accommodating and, perhaps, reconciling each to each. After four long introductory poems, the collection divides into three substantial sequences which explore in different ways the significance of memory as a personal discourse expressed within public, established poetic forms, culminating in the final poem’s imitation of George Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings.’ The terza rima, punctuated by periodic eclogues, is sustained throughout ‘Flesh: An Early Family History’; ‘The Dream Hotel’ leans towards the sonnet sequence (a form explored at length, and in remarkably complex ways, throughout Szirtes’s oeuvre); and the final sequence, ‘Accounts,’ extends to a wider variety of formal variation, including a notable sestina, ‘Elephant.’ Szirtes is flexing formal muscles that have taken many years of careful labour to develop, and in doing so extends his contribution to the ongoing process of developing contemporary links with Modernist experimentation and the poetic tradition.
The tradition, is, in turn, another underlying theme of Reel. Szirtes has always been self-consciously dependent upon formal and allusive structures; his poetry is profoundly visual (he teaches art; his mother, a Holocaust survivor, was a professional photographer in a country that has made a major contribution to the art). English readers may miss the many echoes of Hungarian poetry in his work, but other references are also there to signify the productiveness of conflicting allegiances, a willingness to beg, borrow and steal from a variety of sources. Sometimes, as in ‘Meeting Austerlitz,’ the occasion determines the nature of the allusion. An elegy on the death of W. G. Sebald (addressed through his own fictional character, Jacques Austerlitz), who, like Szirtes, migrated to England and took up residence as a lecturer in East Anglia, this poem offers an extraordinary meditation on literature and loss, a lament that develops, through reference to Sebald’s own writing, into a celebration of shared experience. Alluding in turn to key poems from the modernist elegiac tradition (the title echoes Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’; the poem is haunted by memories of Auden’s ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’), ‘Meeting Austerlitz’ opens in a fenland landscape at Christmas, a scene of natural and cultural desolation that gradually modulates into a territory of shared aspiration, a ground established upon which a dialogue between two writers begins to reconstruct a common past into a common destiny. England is imagined through the prism of “the homeless / intellect”, its landscapes grounding diverse identities. “It’s names we journey through”, Austerlitz / Sebald tells us, “they’re landscapes of whatever happens and goes / on happening as we progress”. In the poem’s final section, these names combine into a single name to accommodate “the homeless intellect”, “the Esperia Hotel in Athens”: “The name of the hotel,” the poem’s dialogue concludes, “as you know, means hope.”
If the early sequences of Reel display a formal and thematic assuredness characteristic of a poet in command of his material, this impression is reinforced by the confidence with which later poems in the collection are prepared to question such certainties, offering, instead, closer insights into the genuine insecurities that circumscribe Szirtes’s deepest themes. In ‘Shoulder,’ a Whitmanesque ode, the poet’s lament is linguistic, an anguished outcry at the failure of communication between people and between modes of representation:
The Siren’s song of the other, encoded in a different medium, remains inaccessible to the poet, who is reduced to Keatsian, impossible questions, as if before a silent urn:
Such moments of despair are rare in this collection, and are balanced, in poems like ‘Climate’, by the confident re-assertion of “the language of life” as one of the many habitual languages of the poet, in sentences that recall the lyrical tones of Seamus Heaney:
The power of such moments of intense, introverted lyricism rests alongside the darker intimacies of Szirtes’s engagement with European traditions, the force of which confirms him, here as elsewhere in his work, as a significant post-Holocaust poet. The sequence ‘Decades,’ alluding to the first half of the twentieth century, opens with Yeats’s famous condemnation of his generation combined with European hand-wringing at hackneyed modern American political rhetoric: “The best lack all conviction while / the worst have gone the extra mile.” By the final ‘Fifth Decade: The Palace of Arts,’ the controlled anger of this poem is powerfully tangible, harnessing medieval Gothicisms to its critique:
The metonymic list is enough to signify the horror towards which the poem relentlessly moves, from Breughel and Bosch to Auschwitz.
Szirtes sustains this balance between the interdependent demands of ethical commentary and visual observation throughout Reel. His poetry seeks to express those difficult, contradictory truths that are abstract and material, remembered and forgotten, personal and general. The collection concludes with the careful finality of the final poem, ‘Winter Wings,’ an optimistic, self-allusive (the wings anagrammatised in the middle of the second stanza) rendition of the inevitable movement of the living – “lurching,” “swimming” or “in full flight” – towards “dust” and death:
Works Cited
Szirtes, George. An English Apocalypse. Bloodaxe Books, 2001.
Szirtes, George, and Miklos Varda, eds. Leopard V – An Island of Sound: Hungarian Poetry and Fiction before and beyond the Iron Curtain. London: The Harvill Press, 2004.
|
|