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.
