Fresh Out of the Sky

In Fresh Out of the Sky, a new collection by the author of many volumes of poetry, memoir, and translation, George Szirtes ranges through a lifetime of experiences, from the COVID pandemic back to his childhood in England after his family escaped the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, recalling the process of learning a new language, which he equates with taking the measure of poetry itself:

It’s not a universe you understand
but you must master it, its poetry 
unutterable, and — as yet — unscanned. 

Szirtes seeks to find poetic forms for an inner life saturated with memories of loved ones who have died, of a nation (Hungary) that he lost and another country (Britain) that he had to work consciously to join, and of identities (Jewishness, “proper” Englishness) beset by time and change: “When there is sorrow / we will employ formal terms.” In “English rain,” he writes, “Rain was a hood / you wore in the street and took off once at home. / It was another name for England.” In “The Jewish Quarter,” he sees a “burning bush” in the remembered light of the ghetto and mournfully proclaims 

[…] there’s nothing in the bush just symbols 
and man does not live by symbols alone 
not even in solitary confinement
not even in the ovens such lights configure. 

The best poems here dramatize, with verve and specificity, the ways in which an alert and often devastated consciousness assimilates the joy and desolation of the world. Contemplating his father’s ashes in “Dust,” the speaker says, “Your dust lies heavy on me as if I should carry you / to some coherence though I myself am scattered.” And in “Morning Poem,” the speaker awakens to a new day—of “plain and simple light”—and rediscovers how our aloneness embodies meaning and beauty:

And there you stand at the very centre of it, blazed, lit, 
blown, by the world in which you find yourself, alone 
in the middle of Monet’s field, of Seurat’s riverbank