Szirtes, George - Nicholas Murray (review date 7 June 1996)
Nicholas Murray (review date 7 June 1996)
SOURCE: Murray, Nicholas. “Retro to the Metro.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4862 (7 June 1996): 26.
[In the following review, Murray examines Szirtes's selections for his book Selected Poems. 1976-1996.]
“I'm merely a reporter whose truth lies / in diction clear as water”, declares the narrator of “Street Entertainment”, a poem from Bridge Passages (1991), the sixth of the seven collections raided for this impressively consistent and accomplished Selected Poems: 1976-1996. George Szirtes has always cast a cool eye on the human and the physical landscapes—often reading one in terms of the other—and is reluctant to draw too many conclusions from his attentively realized word-pictures. An early poem, “Background Noises”, enjoins us to “hold off the intelligence” and attend to “solid, untearful matter”. Another warns garden birds: “I will not make you...
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