SOURCE: Romer, Stephen. “Events through Glass.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4611 (16 August 1991): 24.

In the following review, Romer discusses the emotions found in the poetry of Szirtes's Bridge Passages.

Geòrge Szirtes's new book carries the dedication “For my friends in Hungary”, which puts us instantly in the picture, given that most of the poems were composed in Hungary itself during the momentous months of 1989-90. To outsiders, the demise of the Communist regime there was perhaps less spectacular, and in a sense less public, than the similar events in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and especially Romania. As if in keeping with our more muffled perception of Hungary, the poems in Bridge Passages are themselves remarkably oblique.

One hesitates to use a phrase like “distanced appraisals” in describing them, because so many of them are intimate, or intimiste in their precise evocation of interiors, the claustrophobic flats of urban Central Europe; in...