Winner of The King's Gold Medal for Poetry, 2024
Poetry Book Society Recommendation
Shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize
The title-poem of George Szirtes’ The Burning of the Books and other poems is the core of this collection of narrative sequences by a writer who came to Britain as a child refugee after the Hungarian Uprising. Book burning is associated with the Nazis’ burning of what they considered to be subversive books in 1933, but the practice has a long history, right down to our own day. In this particular case the burning refers to the library of Kien, the scholar, in Elias Canetti’s novel Auto da Fé. The poems follow and expand from the events of Canetti’s book in a variety of forms not previously used by Szirtes.
Two further sequences are concerned with history and documentary, one about the discovery of small snippets of film recording the liberation of Penig concentration camp where Szirtes’s mother was imprisoned, and another of songs concerning war and documentary photography. There are also prose poems, monologues, a series of canzoni, a group of poems exploring the origins of love in childhood, and another based on the mythical travels of Sir John Mandeville about the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. The book, as a whole, constitutes an exploration of the range and flexibility of a voice attuned to the patterns of history and the way such patterns transform our sense of the present.
'George Szirtes is a deserving recipient of the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry. For decades his crafted, observational poems have turned the spotlight on society and its values - how countries and regimes treat their people, how people operate under fluctuating political ideologies. His work and his perspectives are as relevant now as they were when he first put pen to paper, and possibly more so.' – Simon Armitage, Poet Laureate, on behalf of the Poetry Medal Committee 2024
‘A brilliantly virtuosic collection of deeply felt poems concerned with the personal impact of the dislocations and betrayals of history. The 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, on Reel, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize.
‘A major contribution to post-war literature…Using a painter-like collage of images to retrieve lost times, lives, cities and betrayed hopes, Szirtes weaves his personal and historical themes into work of profound psychological complexity’ – Anne Stevenson, Poetry Review.
'Any new collection from George Szirtes will treat its readers to a unique poetic combination: immense versatility and virtuosity when it comes to form, but also a tireless sympathy that dwells clear-sightedly on shocks, traumas and hard-won renewals from a century of migration and massacre. This volume has typically strong-voiced sequences...But its title sequence truly takes the breath away: a meditation on the love and hatred of knowledge, and why fury against literature did not start or end on Nazis' pyres... Read Szirtes to feel the exquisite, excruciating paper cuts of history' - Boyd Tonkin, The Independent, on The Burning of the Books and other poems.
George Szirtes: 'Metro'
George Szirtes reads two extracts from his long poem-sequence 'Metro' from his New & Collected Poems. This film is from the DVD-book In Person: 30 Poets, filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce, edited by Neil Astley, which includes several poems read by George Szirtes from his New & Collected Poems.
Ireland: Click here to order from Books Upstairs in Dublin
USA: Click here to order from Indiebound or Bookshop.org
