The poet, marked as the most important British poet by the academic world, delves and scouts for the surreal stories in his surreal chronotope.

How My Father Became English

Short, hook-nosed, and soft-dark-eyed father, how far you have come from poor inner-city flats, from hiking in the Tatras, rowing down the Danube, from anti-Jewish laws and jobs in offices,  warehouses and factories, carrying sinks and baths through streets of Budapest; through forests in White Russia, riding back on trucks to fallen tenements,  bare houses emptied of murdered relatives, back to inflation and worthless paper money,  speechmaking, prize giving, Stalinist paranoia, revolution, night-flight on foot across fields with nothing in your bag but a tiny cache of photographs, to rooms and maisonettes, terraces and suburbs, slowly but surely into the arms of Thatcher, with those great soft dark eyes of yours, into an Englishness that formed a warm blanket around your shivering body, in puritan comforts floating to safety with flexible freedoms, into whose distances you could at last melt, into whose fabled and extraordinary greenness  you could at last read yourself, as into a novel, while falling, decanting your spirit from your body.

Sweet and annoying father, was this the crown you dreamt on, you who had become, and not without terrors  middle-class, yes, a self-made Englishman, severally and nearly, so almost but not quite, in the ageing of your body and the minor but growing chaos in the bureaus and systems of your head which still is capable of sorting through papers,  remembering birthdays, visiting the cemetery, writing up anecdotes and words of lost proverbs, sweet and annoying, and certainly pale and certainly, in your own peculiar fashion middle-class, and certainly male, though by no means as certainly English,  aspiring, aspiring to the calm hills that rise like tombstones around you.

The rain keeps falling as if out of some regret it can’t speak about.

It falls through the air in its inexpressible  sorrow. But there’s joy

in its abandon, its sheer verticality. How lovely rain is,

It’s that silver rain again. The consolation of tiny mercies.

And there’s the clear thrust of the wind, a country blown into its future.

Soaked birds still emit their flute-like claims to selfhood. Nothing will stop them

once they are own light.

3. In the city of the imagination

In the cities of the imagination, rain falls on damp gardens,

its soft hands tapping on some sleeping breathing thing. Perhaps it’s the earth

itself that’s breathing city air. Under it, dreams go about their tasks,

After a few days the dead began to hover in the smoky air

like low cloud. Their tears had washed the streets clear of blood. It was safe again.

But they kept weeping and running into gutters. The weather had changed.

It would rain for years.

(George Szirtes was born in 1948 in Budapest and came to England as a refugee following the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. He trained as a painter in Leeds and London, and is the author of several collections of poetry, his first being The Iron Clouds (1975). His Selected Poems 1976-1996 appeared in 1996, and his New and Collected Poems in 2008. His poetry collection Reel (2004), was awarded the 2004 T.S. Eliot Prize. He has also edited poetry books, including co-editing The Colonnade of Teeth: Twentieth Century Hungarian Poetry (1996) and An Island of Sound: Hungarian Poetry and Fiction before and beyond the Iron Curtain (2004).

George Szirtes became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1982 and has since won many awards for his work including Man Booker International winner, as translator of László Krasznahorkai. He lives in Norfolk where he teaches Creative Writing at the Norwich School of Art and Design and the University of East Anglia. His New and Collected Poems was published in 2008, and his recent poetry collections include The Burning of the Books and other poems (2009) and Bad Machine (2013), both shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.)