SOURCE: O'Reilly, Caitriona. “Possibilities of Vision.” Poetry Nation Review 25, no. 4 (March-April 1999): 79-80.

In the following essay, O'Reilly discusses the technical merit of Szirtes's poetry in his book Portrait of My Father in an English Landscape.

Portrait of my Father in an English Landscape is Hungarian-born poet George Szirtes's most recent collection. The volume is concerned with the poet's memories of his family and early childhood in Eastern Europe, and in an England overshadowed by deprivation and war. This translates symbolically into a poetry which is obsessed by effacement and decay. ‘Four Villonesques on Desire’ comprise a witty meditation on the subject, while Szirtes's sketches of contemporary urban life are particularly striking, with virtuoso single-sentence poems like ‘Tinseltown’ and ‘The First, Second, Third and Fourth Circles’ conveying the speed, impermanence and consequent exhaustion of city living. A particularly enjoyable feature of Szirtes's varied technique is his use of a...