SOURCE: Palmer, William. “A New Slant.” Poetry Review 70, no. 3 (December 1980): 68-70.

In the following review, Palmer writes favorably about The Slant Door.

George Szirtes has achieved in The Slant Door that rare thing—a book that cannot be wrapped in a five hundred word review and dropped to oblivion. It is one of the best first books of poetry to be published in the past few years, that is, if we judge by successful poems and not by promise or critically adduced intentions.

This, of course, is to take the book as a whole, and in an unusually meaty book, with poems crowded together on the page, there is a fair amount of XXth century poetic stock:

Sunlight laces the book The dying light shudders The trees fling their doily patterns high 

The last line is from one of those of poems about the pathos of old age...