SOURCE: Sutherland-Smith, James. “In and Out of Focus.” Poetry Nation Review 28, no. 1 (September-October 2001): 68-9.

In the following review, Sutherland-Smith discusses Szirtes's life in relation to his book The Budapest File.

George Szirtes so far has enjoyed a distinguished career as a poet and translator with the occasional acerbic review to add bite. His change of English publisher has resulted in a Collected poems about Budapest and Central Europe. The book is dedicated to the memory of his mother and to his father both of whom emerge as remarkable presences in the book, as does the poet himself, rather more so than the city of Budapest which remains curiously elusive, coming and going in and out of focus from poem to poem. ‘The First, Second, Third and Fourth Circles’ uses a Dantean trope to give Budapest an infernal character, but this is not helped by the pseudo-pyrotechnics of the...