[In the following review, Sutherland-Smith discusses Szirtes's life in relation to his book The Budapest File.]

Szirtes' introductory essay briefly describes his family's escape from Hungary in 1956, his learning of English and his early attempts to write at art college in Leeds under the mentorship of the Group poet, Martin Bell. It seems that Szirtes was ‘hurt into poetry’ by the suicide of his mother in 1975 with memories of his early childhood in Budapest becoming central to his work. Szirtes is Jewish by birth and it can be asserted with justification that the Holocaust is a powerful underlying current in his poetry. His mother, a photographer, was a survivor of the concentration camps and his father's attempts to gain a profession were thwarted at every turn. This is not dwelt on in Szirtes' essay, but emerges in the poems. Indeed, Szirtes must be able to regard Budapest in only the most ambiguous of lights. A less scrupulous writer than Szirtes might have proposed a comparison with his mother and, say, the early deaths of Paul Celan and Primo Levi, but Szirtes seems to be self-denying rather than self-serving, reticent to the point of inhibition. This emerges towards the end of the essay in a denial of his linguistic competence. This seems to be nodding slantwise at the presence of regional voices in British poetry over the last thirty years not the least of which is Seamus Heaney. Szirtes misunderstands the ability of Heaney and others, such as Douglas Dunn, to appropriate from the whole of the English language. The OED is, after all, encyclopaedic. Szirtes himself is bilingual in two vastly dissimilar languages and therefore in English terms is linguistically gifted rather than impoverished. Any of his poems reveals a mastery of vocabulary, image, rhyme and metre. The worry reflected in his essay about using an ungrounded Standard English perhaps reflects an unease about the lack of variety in the registers he employs. Apart from a few examples Szirtes sounds very much the same from poem to poem: there is sensuous, original imagery aplenty, a deftness with rhyme but a somewhat ornate diction and a late Augustan monotony of rhythm. For example, in the last verse of ‘English Words’ I assume a shift in register is signalled by the change of pronoun in the first line although there is a little local difficulty in that momentarily the reader might not be sure what ‘One’ applies to; ‘I’ or ‘words’:

I cannot trust words now. One cultivates
the sensuous objects in a locked museum:
voluptuously, but behind thick glass.
Their emptiness appalls one. One is dumb
with surprise at their inertia, their crass
hostility. They are beautiful opiates,
as brilliant as poppies, as absurd.

This last verse of the poem uses the impersonal pronoun to create a distancing effect. However, there is no change in Szirtes' habitual sentence structure or vocabulary to sustain the intended shift in voice with the result that the last verse sounds like Rory Bremner doing a Prince Charles impersonation which I feel sure was not intended. Szirtes has greater success when he maintains the same voice throughout the whole of a poem. ‘The Idea of Order at the József Attila Estate’ is as perfectly achieved as anything he has done, giving a sense of living in Central European block of flats with its mixture of personal histories, ‘The woman once sentenced to death, / The silver beard of the courier spy’, the imminence of things possibly about to become worse, ‘No one has yet tipped rubbish down from the tenth floor’, and the abiding sensation of anti-climax following 1989, ‘Where death entails merely a comfortless distancing’.

Elsewhere when Szirtes attempts to vary his style he often succeeds in only sounding like someone else. The opening poem of the book ‘The Drowned Girl’ seems rather too close to Seamus Heaney, not only in references to ‘uncouth labials’ and ‘grammar of countries’ but also geographically, ‘Drowned miles, bleached bones. / Earls of Meath or Ardglass.’ And what this poem has to do with Budapest is anybody's guess. The last part of ‘The Lullaby of Broadway’ is pure Auden; ‘This is the band and this the stage, / this the only table / These are the dancers in their rage / and this the Tower of Babel.’

Sometimes, however, Szirtes abandons strict form and the results are striking and powerful. ‘The Lost Money’ is written in four long, unrhyming paragraphs of unequal length, the first two of which are, this time, single sentences whose complexity matches the shifts of memory in the poem's narrator. The last two stanzas contrast the narrator's mild neurosis about dropping his change on the floor with the brutalities of existence for a homeless alcoholic couple. The closing image is savage, ‘her bruised lips bear / a faint glaze of saliva which disturbs / as if loose change were spilling from her mouth.’

The Budapest File is divided into three parts; ‘The Town Flattened: war correspondence’, ‘The Courtyards: Iron Curtains’ and ‘The Flies’, the last section consisting of poems about the present. There are impressive poems in all of them, but also poems whose place is debatable. It is as if Szirtes is in two minds about the validity of locating the major part of his work in a single region. This would not matter if there were sufficient variety in diction and form, but the three sections tend to accumulate as great wodges of precisely observed and fussily rendered vignettes with occasional ambitious leaden rights of fancy such as ‘The Lullaby of Broadway’ which, apart from the Auden pastiche at the end, only calls to mind the greater verve that Martin Bell brought to his poem ‘To Celebrate Eddie Cantor’ for example, the line ‘Voice soaring in gleeful lubricity’. In the film Golddiggers 1933 I seem to recall Cantor singing ‘Keep young and beautiful if you wanna be loved’. All too often Szirtes seems to be singing the line ‘Sound middle-aged and stodgy if you would wish to be respected’.

At the end of the book there are no fewer than three sonnet sequences dedicated to fellow poets, all having the same structure of fifteen sonnets the last of which in each sequence is composed of variations on the last line in the preceding fourteen poems. Furthermore, the last word in each sonnet is the last word of the first line in the succeeding sonnet. Why there have to be three is beyond this reviewer's understanding. Once is surely enough to demonstrate one's virtuosity, all the more so as the last of these ‘Portrait of My Father in an English Landscape’ is a marvellous summation not only of the interaction of an individual and the terrible history of which he is part, but also how the cost of survival reverberates in his closest relationships. The eleventh sonnet in this sequence indicates the range that Szirtes achieves when he forgets that there might be an audience of his peers. The poem opens with his father as a kind of anachronistic fairy-tale wolf who even becomes more than a little pathetic after an accident on a building site. But then the wolf shows his teeth:

                                        I remember how he stroked
my face. Not then. Some other time.
                                                                                                              Just once
he let fly at me, when he had been
                                                                                                              provoked.
I had upset my mother.

Here language is simple and the ornate sentence has been dispensed with. Simple sentences, often only two words in length, allow variations in pace and shifts in mood that Szirtes achieves all too rarely.

The Budapest File is an overblown collection. A book half the length containing the best of the poems which whirl around Szirtes' Jewish-Hungarian origins would be a collection of poems to prize especially considering the personal integrity that emerges without recourse to chest-beating. But at the moment readers will have to extract the best poems for themselves from much that is derivative, mannered and playing to a gallery of fellow, approving artificers.