George Szirtes is a poet and translator who came to the UK as an eight-year-old refugee after the Hungarian uprising in 1956. He studied in England to be a painter, but very early began writing poetry, always in his second language, English. He has won numerous awards and accolades: his first collection of poems, The Slanted Door, won the Faber Prize in 1980, and 25 years later another collection, Reel, won the T.S. Eliot Prize. He has also edited several anthologies of Hungarian poetry and published numerous translations, as well as a study of the work of artist Ana Maria Pacheco. He lives in Norfolk, where he teaches creative writing at the Norwich School of Art and Design and the University of East Anglia. In a 2005 essay published in The Guardian, Szirtes defines poetry’s place tellingly and eloquently in two propositions:

1. Poets are ordinary people with a special love and distrust of language.
2. Poetry is not a pretty way of saying something straight, but the straightest way of saying something complex.

It is in fact vital to love and distrust language. It is absolutely vital to tell truths that catch something of the complex polyphonic music of what happens. Someone has got to do it. It is poetry’s unique task to say exactly what it means by singing it and dancing it, by carving some crystalline pattern on the thin, cold surface of language, thereby keeping language audible and usable. That is its straightness. That is its legislation.

Here are links to a few places where you can read or hear his work online:

• The Poetry Foundation has a lot of Szirtes’ work, including seven poems first published in Poetry magazine, an audio poem, his contribution to the Poetry podcast entitled “When Guns Talk the Muses Fall Silent,” and a craft essay, “Formal Wear: Notes on Rhyme, Meter, Stanza & Pattern.”
• Google Video UK has a film version of his poem “Accordionist” from Poems on the Underground.
• A video animation of his poem “The Button Maker’s Tale” is at the British Council arts Web site.
• Five poems appeared in the “Eclectic England” issue of Mad Hatter’s Review.
• Qarrtsiluni online literary magazine has of Szirtes’ poems: “Known Them,” “Plunge” and “Say.”
• Two poems, “Questions for Stan Laurel” and “Canzone,” for Marilyn Hacker were published in the September 2007 issue of Guernica.

To purchase his poetry books, use these shopping links:

• New and Collected Poems (poems, Bloodaxe Books Ltd., 2009)
  
• Reel (poems, Bloodaxe Books Ltd., 2004)
  
• An English Apocalypse (poems, Bloodaxe Books Ltd., 2001)
  
• The Budapest File (poems, Bloodaxe Books Ltd., 2001)
  
• Portrait of My Father in an English Landscape (poems, Oxford University Press, 1998)
  
• Selected Poems, 1976 - 1996 (poems, Oxford University Press, 1996)
  
• Bridge Passages (poems, Oxford University Press, 1991)
  

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