SOURCE: Murray, Nicholas. “Retro to the Metro.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4862 (7 June 1996): 26.

In the following review, Murray examines Szirtes's selections for his book Selected Poems. 1976-1996.

“I'm merely a reporter whose truth lies / in diction clear as water”, declares the narrator of “Street Entertainment”, a poem from Bridge Passages (1991), the sixth of the seven collections raided for this impressively consistent and accomplished Selected Poems: 1976-1996. George Szirtes has always cast a cool eye on the human and the physical landscapes—often reading one in terms of the other—and is reluctant to draw too many conclusions from his attentively realized word-pictures. An early poem, “Background Noises”, enjoins us to “hold off the intelligence” and attend to “solid, untearful matter”. Another warns garden birds: “I will not make you metaphors just yet.” But for all the restraint, the emphasis on clear seeing rather than poetizing, Szirtes's world is nothing...