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George Szirtes Home


Photo by Caroline Forbes

Leading A Charred Life: Seven Short Songs

John Latham, Observer IV, 1960

1.
I had thought to have been charmed
Not framed:
Had thought to be disarmed
Not blamed.

But life hangs fire as if suspended
As if it had been slyly ended.

2.
We cannot altogether escape the fact.
The facts are something that can’t be quite escaped.
But something is wrong in both thought and act:
The act is thought, and act and thought are shaped.

3.
Had I behaved better than I did…
Had sky been lighter, detail more compact…
Had escape ever been possible…
Had I but thought, were it still feasible to act…

4.
Someone is raising a hand at a bus stop.
Someone is waving to someone on the other side.
We watch the smile light briefly on a face.
We watch our loved ones make their way through space,
Then space rolling in like a tide,
Entering a bus, a house, a shop.

5.
Sometimes the beauty of wood is overwhelming.
We love that which seems warm yet indifferent.
So things burn down, so wood turns to coal,
So coal begins where trees are rife.
So we survive. We lead a (haha) charred life.

6.
There is the terrible vehicle of darkness
That runs over us in hope.
There is my hand, there are your fingers.
We hang by our fingertips. We cope.

7.
If poetry were just a matter of the air
Playing around the heart
We’d feel a powerful gust beneath our lungs
And call it art -
And art would do, or be, at least, a start.



This poem is also to be found in the blog part of the site, under News, where I have a sound recording of it too.




George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948 and came to England as a refugee in 1956. He was brought up in London and studied Fine Art in London and Leeds. His poems began appearing in national magazines in 1973 and his first book, The Slant Door, was published in 1979. It won the Faber Memorial prize the following year.

By this time he was married with two children. After the publication of his second book, November and May, 1982, he was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Since then he has published several books and won various other prizes including the T S Eliot Prize for Reel in 2005.

Having returned to his birthplace, Budapest, for the first time in 1984, he has also worked extensively as a translator of poems, novels, plays and essays and has won various prizes and awards in this sphere. His own work has been translated into numerous languages.

Beside his work in poetry and translation he has written Exercise of Power, a study of the artist Ana Maria Pacheco, and, together with Penelope Lively, edited New Writing 10 published by Picador in 2001.

George Szirtes lives near Norwich with his wife, the painter Clarissa Upchurch to whose website this is linked. Together they ran The Starwheel Press. Corvina has recently produced Budapest: Image, Poem, Film, their collaboration in poetry and visual work.

There is a variety of old and new poems to be found on this site. Apart from the regularly replaced poem on the home page, there is a regularly maintained Blog in the News section, and some stray notes and photographs in Notes. Poems and excerpts from published books (as well as selected reviews) may be located by clicking on specific books in the Books section. There is also an audio sample available among the Links.

Contact details

Email:

georgeszirtes@googlemail.com