Publisher's Synopsis
George Szirtes came to England as an eight-year-old refugee fleeing with his family after the Hungarian uprising. His prevous book The Budapest File brought together his poems on Hungarian themes, exploring universal issues of loss, danger and exile. An English Apocalypse presents the poetry he has written from the other side, as an English Hungarian writer who grew up with ambiguous feelings towards his adoptive country. Szirtes's England seems to mirror his own split personality: a place and people he loves and needs to love, yet which also prompts anxiety and unease, frustration and even indifference. As both outsider and insider, a writer who views his two countries from a distance as well as with intimate knowledge and delicate understanding. England possesses his imagination as powerfully as his almost unreachable, native city in The Budapest File - disturbingly real yet also phantasmagorical, a spectral country living out its past, its people haunted by failure and disappointment. Over half the poems in An English Apocalypse are completely new. In the title-sequence - a work of breathtaking originality - Szirtes takes us inside his love-hate relationship with the country which enthrals him before England goes down with all hands like the Titanic at Armageddon. This edition is now out of print with all the work it includes now part of Szirtes' New & Collected Poems.
