The title-poem of George Szirtes' The Burning of the Books and other
poems is the core of this collection of narrative sequences by a
writer who came to Britain as a child refugee after the Hungarian
Uprising. Book burning is associated with the Nazis' burning of what
they considered to be subversive books in 1933, but the practice has a
long history, right down to our own day. In this particular case the
burning refers to the library of Kien, the scholar, in Elias Canetti's
novel Auto da Fé. The poems follow and expand from the events of
Canetti's book in a variety of forms not previously used by Szirtes.
Two further sequences are concerned with history and documentary, one
about the discovery of small snippets of film recording the liberation
of Penig concentration camp where Szirtes's mother was imprisoned, and
another of songs concerning war and documentary photography. There are
also prose poems, monologues, a series of canzoni, a group of poems
exploring the origins of love in childhood, and another based on the
mythical travels of Sir John Mandeville about the Hungarian Uprising
of 1956. The book, as a whole, constitutes an exploration of the range
and flexibility of a voice attuned to the patterns of history and the
way such patterns transform our sense of the present. Poetry Book
Society Recommendation, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781780370200
Publisert
2016
Utgiver
Vendor
Bloodaxe Books
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter