Reel by George Szirtes
Szirtes's two earlier Bloodaxe selections The Budapest File and An English Apocalypse brought together his poems on Hungarian and English themes. In this later collection, Reel, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, 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.
A brilliantly virtuosic collection of deeply felt poems concerned with the personal impact of the dislocations and betrayals of historyThe judges were impressed by the unusual degree of formal pressure exerted by Szirtes on his themes of memory and the impossibility of forgetting. -- Douglas Dunn * chair of judges, T.S. Eliot Prize *
George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948, and came to England with his family after the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. He was educated in England, training as a painter, and has always written in English. In recent years he has worked as a translator of Hungarian literature, producing editions of such writers as Ottó Orbán, Zsuzsa Rakovszky and Ágnes Nemes Nagy. He co-edited Bloodaxe’s Hungarian anthology The Colonnade of Teeth. His Bloodaxe poetry books include: The Budapest File (2000); An English Apocalypse (2001); Reel (2004), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize; New & Collected Poems (2008) and The Burning of the Books and other poems (2009), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2009. Bad Machine (2013) was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2013. His latest collection, Mapping the Delta (2016), was the Poetry Book Society Choice for Winter 2016. A new collection, Fresh Out of the Sky, is forthcoming from Bloodaxe in 2021. Bloodaxe has also published his Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures, Fortinbras at the Fishhouses: Responsibility, the Iron Curtain and the sense of history as knowledge (2010), and John Sears’ critical study, Reading George Szirtes (2008). His memoir of his mother, The Photographer at Sixteen, was published by MacLehose Press in 2019. Szirtes lives in Norfolk and is a freelance writer, having retired from teaching at the University of East Anglia.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781852246761 |
| ISBN 10 | 1852246766 |
| Title | Reel |
| Author | George Szirtes |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Bloodaxe Books Ltd |
| Year published | 2004-11-25 |
| Number of pages | 144 |
| Prizes | Winner of T S Eliot Prize 2004 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |