A Drunken Boat

Poetry ~ Five Poems by George Szirtes
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​A Drunken Boat
 
 
My ears full of prose
I ventured up the river
of myself for verse.
 
Rimbaud's redskins shot
volleys of arrows at me
I was pleased to say.
 
There's poetry yet,
I thought, as one arrow pierced
me through both ears
 
and both open eyes.
 

 
Washing
 
When I was a child
their enormous sails blustered
in fierce city wind.
They were my mother
in ghostly dress when the wind
tugged at her dark hair.
She flew with the sheets,
skirts flapping and half our clothes
flying off with her

in sheets of laughter.
 

 
Night Train


The night train stops here,
just at that platform. You will
hear it approaching.


Here the journey starts
into that plump-heart darkness
you will not notice.


You will be dreaming
of the carriage and the lights
in the far distance


that sounds like your heart.
 

 
Metropolis
 
 
Long out of cities
he enters like the shadow
of several lives,
 
one of them his own,
but which? The street map is strange.
He cannot read it.
 
Once this was knowledge,
now it’s a shot in the dark.
He reads the drainage
 
and haunts the platforms.
 
 

 
Obsolete
 
 
They were obsolete
right from the start. But later,
reflecting on it,
 
their obsolescence
seemed to be desirable
so they longed for it.
 
It was night. The wind
ran through their bones. They rattled
a little, quaintly,
 
as if uncertain.
 
 

​George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948 and came to England as a refugee with his parents and younger brother following the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. He grew up in London and trained as a painter in Leeds and London. He is the author of some fifteen books of poetry, roughly the same of translation from Hungarian, and a few miscellaneous other books. His first, The Slant Door (1979) was joint winner of the Faber Memorial Prize. In 2004 he won the T S Eliot Prize for Reel, and was shortlisted for the prize again in 2009 for The Burning of the Books and for Bad Machine (2013). There were a number of other awards between. Bloodaxe published his New and Collected Poems in 2008. His translations  from Hungarian have won international prizes, including the Best Translated Book Award in the USA for László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango (2013) and his latest book for children, In the Land of the Giants won the CLPE Prize for best collection of poetry for children, also in 2013. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in the UK and of the Szécheny Academy of Arts and Letters in Hungary. He is married to painter, Clarissa Upchurch and recently retired from teaching at the University of East Anglia. For a fuller CV see his website at georgeszirtes.blogspot.co.uk

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