Reel

Summary

Drawing on his family's experience as Hungarian Jewish refugees and his own displacement to England, this collection uses the structures of formal verse—particularly the terza rima—to process the fragmented, cinematic quality of traumatic memory. Szirtes writes with a European sensibility that is rare in British poetry, moving between the historical and the personal with equal seriousness and craft. The collection is one of the most accomplished treatments of exile and inherited loss in recent poetry.