The Budapest file - George Szirtes

Although George Szirtes was born in Budapest, and spent his early childhood in Hungary before coming to England as a refugee, it wasn't until 1984 that he began to write about his native city, its history and the experience of leaving it. Through all his books since it has grown into a theme to which he returns to time and again, a spectral place full of 'voices, words, stenches, scents' and desire 'pulled like a tooth'. This book gathers together his poems on Hungarian themes, exploring universal issues of loss, danger and exile. The Budapest File is like no other book. Through these powerfully evocative poems, George Szirtes recreates a changing Budapest, from the city he remembered as a child, through the imaginative versions he created in exile, to the actual place he found on his return and after the fall of Communism. He writes as both an outsider, whose perspective is totally different from that of Hungarian writers translated into English, and as an insider, with an intimate knowledge and delicate understanding of a place which has always haunted his imagination. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.