ABSTRACT
Every now and then during the past three decades, the author has come across a poem by George Szirtes in a literary magazine and, after reading it, been left in a state of marvel; or in a meditative mood; and with the urge to read more poems. But this is no true excuse, for Szirtes is also a "foreign poet" who was indeed forced to flee with his family to Great Britain at the age of eight, after the 1956 Hungarian uprising against the Soviet Union. His mother tongue was thus Hungarian, not the English whose teeming vocabulary and tempting rhymes he then mastered at school and in which he has always written his subtle, funny-sad verse with all its vivid observations about the world in his midst. The philosophically resonant French word "donnee", gently odd in this context, already underscores or "sets up" a different, more distant, rapport to reality.
