Event

9th October
Evening, Big Day of Poetry at Cramphorn Theatre.

Bio
George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948 and came to England as a refugee with his family, following the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. Trained in Fine Art, his first book, The Slant Door was joint winner of the Faber Prize in 1980. He has published several books since then that have brought him the Cholmondeley Award and, most recently, the T S Eliot Prize for Reel (2004). His New and Collected Poems were published in 2008 and The Burning of the Books and Other Poems (2009) was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize. He has also translated several books of prize-winning poetry and ficiion from the Hungarian, and edited various anthologies. His monograph on the artist, Ana Maria Pacheco, Exercise of Power was published by Lund Humphries in 2001. He has also written works for stage, worked with artists and composers, run a small press and written for newspapers and radio. A full list of publications may be found under Books at his website, www.georgeszirtes.co.uk, where he also keeps a regular blog under the heading News (georgeszirtes.blogspot.com)

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1982 and of the English Association in 2004.  He is married to the artist Clarissa Upchurch and lives in Norfolk.

George Szirtes is Reader in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

Poem

Postcard 5: The Swan’s Reflection
After Caroline Wright

 Cygnus (picture side)

I am calligraphy. On salt marsh, on the village pond,
I write my name in arabesques. I speak white
To the cloud and the clouded water.
I am the furthest quarter
Of the starless night
And beyond.

I am breast
And wind and moon
And the sheer distance
Of constellations, the persistence
Of desire, the nebulae of systems soon
To vanish: cry and echo, curvature and rest.

Reverse(message) side

Call now.
The phone is on mute.
There is no speech, no language
Lodged in those empty spaces, no gauge
That can measure a distance so silent and absolute
We cannot address it in words, because we don’t know how.

Listen to the street. The voices in shops, in the bus queue,
On the platform. Something curves back at us,
Some echo, arabesque, a kind of pageant,
Like the rhythms of an imagined
Language: sign, Cygnus,
Me, you.