Selected Poems, 1976-1996

This collection, selected by George Szirtes himself from a period of at least twenty years, has been culled from all seven of his published poetry books, several of which are now unavailable. His three major sequences of poems, "The Photographer in Winter," "Metro," and a slightly revised "Transylvana," are included in full. Szirtes has built a reputation not only as an energetic, generous, and skillfull translator from Hungarian, but above all as a brilliant and austere poet in his...
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This collection, selected by George Szirtes himself from a period of at least twenty years, has been culled from all seven of his published poetry books, several of which are now unavailable. His three major sequences of poems, "The Photographer in Winter," "Metro," and a slightly revised "Transylvana," are included in full. Szirtes has built a reputation not only as an energetic, generous, and skillfull translator from Hungarian, but above all as a brilliant and austere poet in his own right. He wields English with the particular skill, strangeness, and originality of one who mediates between the tone of his forebears and the voice he has acquired since childhood, when his family moved to England at the time of the Hungarian uprising.