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George Szirtes is a poet’s poet, whose work is rich in depth of feeling and breadth of vision and who swings easily between the past and the present, netting images, objects, landscapes and people in a kaleidoscopic whirl of language. The book contains work from Szirtes’ early poems about England in the 1950s up to the present day. He writes in his introduction: “My Hungarian selection The Budapest File (2000) dealt with the history of Hungary in roughly chronological fashion: An English Apocalypse is more like a temperature chart.”

     If that is so, then it is very hard to gauge the temperature of ‘Lilac, Laylock’, the collection’s opening poem, exquisitely written, which is both cool and hot. It is a poem of the mind and of the senses, it is a poem about sexuality and young love. A water-colour with a dance beat.

The choreography of water,
the drift of scent caught at,
swirling away, blown back,
was the cunning of the lilac.

She bristled sweetness, arched
like a girl. A bullfinch perched
on her crown, immaculate
in his feathers. His weight

bothered the lilac, she bent
a little, her small tent
of pleasure collapsing
inward with the swaying.

Water and the sea are important images within Szirtes’ poems. He yearns for the sea he never heard as a small child from Hungary, “a country that is set in seas of land”, and England’s coastline is perhaps, one of the things he is most grateful for.

     A prolific poet, he has learnt to be patient with the workings of his mind. Szirtes rarely over-writes, rather, his allusions are so myriad, tender and far reaching that each must be explored, unravelled and described within the confines of the English language, at their own insistence. In ‘Solferino Violet’ he is constantly going back and forth between memory and sensation, and that movement reinforces the musicality of the poem in a subtle and sensuous way:

Resin along horsehair. My brother stood
in front of the open window, tightening strings.
A G-Plan coffee-table, more glass than wood,
supported an ashtray and some tea things.
The suburbs were singing.

Humility and a dry sense of humour, temper Szirtes’ tendency towards a slightly melancholic vision. He notices the bleakness of English culture with a gimlet eye and is fascinated by our everyday artefacts and our sporting obsessions:

At fifty I recall the Best of British like pork
set out on a slab. There is the ringside and there
is our friend, Tibor, the wrestler. It is hot work
being thrown about. My father and I stare
horrified at his violent transformation
into gristle. Bruise after bruise appears.
We feel indecent in the foreign commotion.
My father shakes. I’m on the edge of tears.

His relationship to his father runs through the book, feelings of ambivalence and love; the unresolved tensions of having overtaken him, of being better assimilated within English culture. His friendships with men and fellow poets are acknowledged by several dedications. Very occasionally he is hijacked by a kind of intellectual coldness that makes his work seem rather hermetically sealed.

     ‘Backwaters: Norfolk Fields’ is the core poem of the second half of the book. It is a collection of 12 sonnets dedicated to the late W.G. Sebald. It is part mediation, part discourse, about why he has chosen to live in the county of Norfolk:

The WI stalls. Jam, flowers. White
hair scraped back in the draught of an open door.
The butcher’s. He knows you by name. He calls
your name out. His chopping block is washed
                                                                 bright
by the morning sun. The solicitor
down the street. His nameplate. War
                                                       memorials
with more names. Rows of Standleys, Bunns,
Myhills, Kerridges.

     The last cluster of poems is a kind of angry celebration at being part of this landscape, political, geographical and cultural. A tour de force around English lassitude and inertia mixed with a passion for football and the sense of mystery that lies at the heart of the English pastoral. As he says in the introduction, early on, he found a way into the English landscape and the English subconscious through the paintings of George Stubbs.