SOURCE: Kitchen, Judith. “Tensions.” Georgia Review 53, no. 2 (summer 1999): 368-84.

In the following essay, Kitchen explores the father-son relationships described in Szirtes's poetry volume Portrait of My Father in an English Landscape.

Portrait of My Father in an English Landscape by George Szirtes is one of the most elegantly formal books I've read in recent years. Szirtes is a master of iambic pentameter, of the sonnet in particular, and seems to have found ways to make English rhymes sound new. One way he does this is through innovative use of enjambment; the stanzas unfold seamlessly while the intricacy of the pattern establishes itself, as in the second section of “Busby Berkeley in the Soviet Union”:

This music is in your blood, slithering through your arteries. It's no longer 1934 but whatever you want. Call it today if it pleases you. You're watching tv, some series about hospitals or cops, an...