Fresh Out of the Sky

Fresh Out of the Sky
George Szirtes
RRP:
NZ$ 39.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 31.99
Paperback
h234 x 156mm - 160pg
21 Oct 2021 UK
International import eta 10-19 days
9781780375847
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Fresh Out of the Sky is a book of songs, dreams, laments, narratives and comedies about major life-changes involving country, identity and belonging. It is about perpetually standing at the edge of change, anticipating it, reflecting on it and dreaming about it. The title sequence of the book returns to the terza rima theme of memory, following sequences in George Szirtes' earlier books, such as those about early Budapest childhood explored in Reel, and about growing to adulthood in England in An English Apocalypse. Here the theme is arrival in England as a child in 1956. These are followed by the second part of The Yellow Room, a continuing poem of impossible questions about identity as residual Jewishness, in the form of a dialogue with Szirtes' late father. After that there is a brief section of bridging poems set in the aftermath of war, upheaval and life in contemporary England that leads to Going Viral, a substantial section of ten-line poems, divided into brief chapters, presenting dreamlike reports from the Covid bunkers we have all been inhabiting and ending on occasions of consolation, delight and joy in the midst of darkness and uncertainty. The book then moves, by way of five interludes, from one dreamlike experience to another, in the form of nine dream songs set in an unstable social and political landscape. The last section steps from dream to a bestiary of transformations woven through Guillaume Apollinaire and Graham Sutherland.
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 * Chair 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 * Mapping the Delta touches upon nearly every meaningful human experience, every ' moment' in a lifespan, from falling in love to losing a parent. . . Mapping the Delta wears its emotionalism lightly and its beautiful images modestly. Best of all, it carries its wide experience, sweet hope, garrulous humour and wise joyfulness with life-affirming pride: an important corrective when so much else in the world seems dark and devastated. -- Bidisha * The Poetry Review *
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 Otto Orban, Zsuzsa Rakovszky and Agnes 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 published by 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.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9781780375847
Published: 21 Oct 2021
Published In: United Kingdom
Imprint: Bloodaxe Books
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Format: Paperback
Height: 234mm
Width: 156mm
Pages: 160

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