A Poetic Image-Stack for the '90s
George Szirtes: Portrait of my Father in an English Landscape. Oxford: OUP, £7.99.
George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948, but has lived in England since the Hungarian revolution of 1956, which he fled as a refugee. So it’s not surprising to find a sense of dislocation in his work, but more unusual perhaps to note the overwhelming desire of these poems to find hope for the future, and not in spite of hopelessness but rather because of it.
The most immediately striking feature of Portrait of my Father is Szirtes’ three Hungarian sonnet sequences. The last line of each sonnet is echoed in the opening line of the next. What this achieves, far beyond mere gimmickry, is the curious forcing, or persuading, of a conversation between poet and reader. Inviting you to draw your own parallels, Szirtes makes a point, then approaches it again from a new and unexpected perspective:
Perhaps anecdotes are frozen snowdrifts
that catch the light just so, shapes blown
and surfeited, whose centre remains unknown.Surfeit of snow, the core remains unknown.
A winter park. He drags us forward, up
a slight hill. Our toboggan slithers on
and we descend. Soft landings.
(from sonnets 9 and 10 of the title poem)
There is a great sense of calm in this collection, not exactly resignation but more an awareness that people can cope with whatever is thrown at them, so long as we keep sight of that vital spark which makes us all human: call it the desire for love, or to be loved, or to create, it makes little difference in the end. The awareness of this lack of distinction between struggles, or rather of the connective tissue linking us all together, is what makes Szirtes such a fine writer. He doesn’t need to raise his voice in these poems. Unlike rather too many poets today, he knows amateur dramatics are unnecessary and ultimately futile. His unerringly accurate sense of timing magnetises the attention of the reader so effortlessly, that the poems become part of an ongoing narrative with no clear-cut beginning or end, but one which can be dipped into at any point with equal understanding and fascination. This comes back to my idea of a ‘conversation’ taking place between poet and reader, one of those intimate late-night-early-morning conversations where you feel either of you could say anything, and the other would instantly understand:
the thought of becoming lovers
solidifies like a screen on which is projected
the dream-film of all those other lives which are
not yours
(‘Cerulean Blue: Footnote on Wim Wenders’)
There’s an increasing feeling, I believe, that at the end of such a great century for poetry, there is little left that can be said or done originally. I think Szirtes is very aware of that in his work, and correspondingly the poems draw on many different sources, from personal experience to already extant art. In a poem like ‘The First, Second, Third and Fourth Circles’, referring to Budapest’s system of ring-roads, I get the impression that Szirtes is depicting something rather similar to that grimy urban existence captured by Eliot in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’:
Nineteenth century grid-maps where everyone lives
but wants to move out of, in one room or two rooms
or one and a half rooms, ranged about the communal courtyard,
the sound of a tap or a radio, a beggar or busker,
under the residents’ own square of sky, towards which climb
neglected stairs with blown-away putti.
Of course, we all know why T.S. Eliot wrote the way he did; when society breaks down, language can only express that disintegration by ruthlessly breaking itself down as well. In Portrait of my Father, Szirtes continually approaches language as “the script/ of our lives...our soundtracked/ conversation”; in other words, in cinematic terms, language working aurally rather than on the page, but also language becoming almost passive, where we are ‘shown’ how to react to it, where our linguistic decisions are not only artificially imposed on us, but are being watched and commented on at the same time. In the poem quoted above, ‘Directing an Edward Hopper’, Szirtes describes that “reassuring sinister sense of the dark/ warehouse at the back of the mind” which seems to go hand in hand with this whole experience of writing contemporary poetry; suddenly realising that previous poems have been stockpiled for us – a sort of vast poetic image-stack for the 1990s – which are now just waiting to be accessed.
Szirtes makes good use of his ability to cut and paste from the “codified clutter of skulls, books, and bubbles”, but at the heart of his work is the message, or more accurately, the observation, that something new and fixed can be made out of that clutter, out of the fluidity of poetry’s history: “Some warm lingers/ in them and hovers there like a stain,/ or a bird or a figure caught in mid flight” (‘Rabbits’). But he knows, like most good poets, that there is always a price to be paid for pinning the poem down to absolutes. In ‘Golden Bream’, Szirtes describes the still life painting of fish as “a kind of sanctification/ of the sensible world, moving in beatitudes,// with death in the centre (and what could be better?)”, but ends the poem on a telling note:
their furious
disappointing eyes telling you it’s over, that the cold
has come too suddenly for even half-way reconciliation
between stillness on the one hand and life on the other.
The area of disparity between life and art, while never exactly obvious and fixed, is certainly a place where such mistakes can be made, but I think Szirtes proves in this collection that one of the reasons poets persist in writing from this shady liminal area is that sometimes those mistakes are what they went there for, because memory, observation, the stuff poetry is made up of, can never be entirely accurate, and so a new sort of life can be created out of our misreadings. As he says in ‘Directing an Edward Hopper’, “life is like this, only more so”, and it’s his constant attempt to reach the “more so” part which makes Szirtes such a challenging and rewarding poet to read.
Page(s) 75-77
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