Notes on the Inner City

By George Szirtes

Here is an intriguing and absorbing collection of poems by one of the key poets now writing. Assured yet balanced by a fresh, continued questioning of our histories, current lives, and cultures, this is a brilliantly entertaining, thought-provoking collection sure to delight all readers, and writers.

George Szirtes is the author of  some fifteen books of  poetry, roughly the same of  translations from Hungarian, and miscellaneous other books. In 2004 he won the T. S. Eliot Prize for Reel, and was short listed for the prize again in 2009 and2013. Bloodaxe published his New and Collected Poems in 2008.

In these texts, somehow both magical and concrete, the real doubts itself, is always provisional, is only one of the possibilities, and is everywhere haunted by variations. Szirtes speaks in a unique voice, in which the Europe of fantasists, fable-Europe, golem-Europe, dream-Europe, the Europe of  Schulz and Singer and Chagall, comes into English and is by no means domesticated: an aphoristic voice of  dark and antic wit. – Salman Rushdie