George Szirtes

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A Barbarous Eloquence

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SOURCE: Jenkins, Alan. “A Barbarous Eloquence.” Encounter 59, no. 2 (August 1982): 55-61.

[In the following essay, Jenkins discusses Szirtes's poetic style.]

The poems contained in George Szirtes's November and May are largely concerned with propitiating the grimmer or less manageable gods and with trying to wrest a quirky, by no means comforting morality—in both senses—from the already quirky occurrences of the everyday and the domestic. The epigraph from Mac-Neice's “Snow” (“There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses”) suggests that Szirtes has sensed the limitations of meticulousness, starkness, cleanliness, a strong visual quality, unblurred impressions, confidence and clarity—the terms in which his previous volume was praised—and begun instead to look out for the “mundane apparition,” the unattended moment of mystery or menace; to look out, too, for the words and rhythms that will evoke this malady of the quotidian with oblique forcefulness, deadened, remote decorum of manner:

Forms appear suddenly in mirrors and photographs,
We do not think however that they are entirely at home.
At night the doors are locked. We lock them now.

The rhythms in some poems here may owe something to MacNeice; this numbed serenity of tone while giving utterance to a disturbing and discomfiting vision, and the tendency to turn the arresting perception into a pretext for speculation, are vaguely reminiscent of the Fullers, père et fils. But Szirtes's language is neither as fluent nor as subtly resonant as theirs. It is, though, sometimes agreeably odd:

Yet someone is standing, waiting quietly
making that darkness luminous. I riffle
through my acquaintance, dead or living.

Or “Bravely they swoon it until quite pegged out.” Pegged out is a (deliberate?) lapse of register; and acquaintance, though exact and obscurely pleasing, is no less odd for that: no one speaks like this. Perhaps the strangeness has something to do with the fact that to Szirtes English was, and perhaps in some residual way remains, a foreign language. It is crucial, anyway, to what his poems convey: bits of a world seen up close, with time infinitely slowed—as in the ambitious sequences “Misericords” and “The Dissecting Table”—shot through with flashes of a cryptic, distinctly foreign wisdom.

For the most part, “The hybrid language serves and makes the point,” as in the poem “A Reunion”; occasionally Szirtes's ear fails him, and the cadences refuse to be other than stiffly inert. This surely excessive flatness and clumsiness mars what is otherwise the most memorable piece in the book, “The Birdnesters”: “It was a miracle they had not clubbed / Each other into insensibility.” Elsewhere in the same poem we have an exceptional delicacy and power, corresponding to a very different order of seeing:

Except one bird that seemed perfectly still,
Hovering, glacial, directly above
The blurring figures of Jean and Henri
Like some strange and dangerous benediction.

It is for these strange and dangerous benedictions, and for its subtle paradoxes and contradictions, that Szirtes's poetry should be read.

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