Fresh Out of the Sky
George Szirtes
(Author)
Description
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.
Winner of The King's Gold Medal for Poetry, 2024
Product Details
| Publisher | Bloodaxe Books |
| Publish Date | January 11, 2022 |
| Pages | 136 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781780375847 |
| Dimensions | 9.1 X 6.1 X 0.4 inches | 0.6 pounds |
About the Author
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 Ottó Orbán, Zsuzsa Rakovszky and Ágnes 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 2004; 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. Mapping the Delta (2016), another Poetry Book Society Choice, was followed by Fresh Out of the Sky (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 (MacLehose Press, 2019), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography. Szirtes lives in Norfolk and is a freelance writer, having retired from teaching at the University of East Anglia.
In December 2024 George Szirtes was named as winner of The King's Gold Medal for Poetry, 2024.
Reviews
'His latest volume of poems is a tour de force of what he has termed "the music of what happens", a supremely well-modulated examination of both his own life and the world at large as seen through the eyes of someone, in Bob Dylan's words, "always on the outside of whatever side there was".'--Nick Cooke "London Grip"
'His newest collection of poems, Fresh Out of the Sky, was published by Bloodaxe Books in October 2021. It is a six-part meditation on country, identity, Judaism, belonging and political upheaval. In a world that seems to be growing ever more divided by borders-both physical and ideological--Szirtes brings beauty and humanity to the experience of migration. He reminds us why translation and art are essential in understanding one another and imagining worlds beyond our own.'--Rose Bialer "Asymptote"
'The latest collection by the T S Eliot Prize-winning poet contains poems relating to country, identity, memory, belonging, war and upheaval, many of which relate to his arrival in England as young child after his family fled the 1956 Hungarian uprising.'--Caroline Sanderson "The Bookseller"
'With each collection, the past is redrawn through a mastery of form that we come to expect from this poet, (Szirtes is surely our contemporary master of both the terza-rima and sonnet crown).'--Andrew McDonnell "Ink, Sweat & Tears"
'Without question, George Szirtes is the most distinguished poet now living in England. Hungary's loss was England's gain in 1956 and those elements of Budapest Jewish life that Szirtes has reclaimed imaginatively only serve to enrich and expand England's poetic consciousness.... Dealing with the most dreadful, dark materials, painfully honest about exile and isolation, Fresh Out of the Sky is, unexpectedly, a joyous and life-affirming work.'--Thomas McCarthy "Dublin Review of Books"
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