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georgeszirtes.bsky.social

@georgeszirtes.bsky.social
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georgeszirtes.bsky.social @georgeszirtes.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
RAIN AS SPIRIT Rain becomes spirit. Spray christens the damp. The service continues all day with its own dull music until you are converted to its buttoned faith. Dear English winter, constant visitor, lie down, make yourself at home among these soaked heads.
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georgeszirtes.bsky.social @georgeszirtes.bsky.social · 08/11/2025
THE LAST PEACE When the last peace was pronounced there could be no more war only silence and a standing still that should last for ever now. How good not to move or even to think of moving. How good to stay perfectly still. Peace was surely coming.
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georgeszirtes.bsky.social @georgeszirtes.bsky.social · 27/10/2025
THE FUTURE OF THE FUTURE Talking for ever is a nightmare he wakes from even while speaking. He hears himself launch into a peroration on earwigs and fleas and the lost future of silence. He has heard it all before. There is no future in it.
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georgeszirtes.bsky.social @georgeszirtes.bsky.social · 12/10/2025
NEW TECHNOLOGIES Sometimes things move so fast they seem to have arrived before they were launched. My father, loathing early computers, preferred counting in his head. His head was crowded with numbers. He had worn them in terrible times and rarely lost count.
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georgeszirtes.bsky.social @georgeszirtes.bsky.social · 09/10/2025
CELEBRATING LK In this translation you will look in vain for a full-stop, Stops are there, but hard to find. Keep searching. Oh look, there is one! He must have taken breath. Time can stand still for the blink of a whale's eye. Then the whale goes down, spouting as it dives.
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georgeszirtes.bsky.social @georgeszirtes.bsky.social · 16/09/2025
AUTUMNAL Now the rains have come and days cool and shorten, time curls around itself like a soaked cat. But now and then the sun will out to ease the path down. Autumn is our time. All that late fruit - pears, apples - and dead leaves piling in rust-red gutters.
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georgeszirtes.bsky.social @georgeszirtes.bsky.social · 28/06/2025
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georgeszirtes.bsky.social @georgeszirtes.bsky.social · 23/06/2025
A 25 minute film based on interviews with me in England and in Hungary on the occasion of being awarded the King's Gold Medal for Poetry. The film is in English with Hungarian subtitles www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbNz...
youtube.com
Az irodalom hazatalál – Portréfilm George Szirtesről/ Literaure Comes Home: A Film on George Szirtes
YouTube video by literaTV
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georgeszirtes.bsky.social @georgeszirtes.bsky.social · 12/05/2025
SOMEWHERE IN LANGUAGE Somewhere in language there is space for the world. See! Stand there and watch it appear then vanish. In script, in the yawning gap between parts of speech, there is a house, night, dogs, vicissitudes, murder, delight, the absurd or that’s what we say.
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georgeszirtes.bsky.social @georgeszirtes.bsky.social · 10/05/2025
Spring waits on summer Spring waits on summer like an enthusiastic bride properly dressed for the occasion. Hawthorn, apple blossom, whites bobbing in the wind in mild excitement. Weddings are in season now. Surely something good is in the offing.
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georgeszirtes.bsky.social @georgeszirtes.bsky.social · 29/04/2025
You turn off the light and sense the room rearrange itself around you like a different space where you yourself are different. So simple to leave a world. So simple to stand still. Now you are here, now gone. Turn it off and walk, keep walking.
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georgeszirtes.bsky.social @georgeszirtes.bsky.social · 26/04/2025
THE DOOR After a warm day the coolness of evening shocks the skin. It pleases and revives something that must have been felt after birth when the world entered through a sudden door and announced itself. How cold everything can be, it says. How alive.
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georgeszirtes.bsky.social @georgeszirtes.bsky.social · 15/04/2025
THE LOST When they arrive, they listen to their own breathing with rapt attention. Long trees lean in. Light hangs on the wall. Birds repeat their usual calls. Life attends on such things. To be lost requires intense concentration. Night will wait on their dreams.
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georgeszirtes.bsky.social @georgeszirtes.bsky.social · 06/04/2025
Night in Budapest in a quiet district past midnight. The sleepless turn in silent beds, listening to their own thoughts, neighbours in courtyards locked on to their lives. Where would night be without them? Where are the bright moons of their faint breathing?
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georgeszirtes.bsky.social @georgeszirtes.bsky.social · 21/03/2025
Now it is quiet. Friday night streets are silent and the pubs have closed. You would not believe alternatives existed except in nightmares lurking round corners of the imagination. The windows are closed against the frail wind.
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georgeszirtes.bsky.social @georgeszirtes.bsky.social · 15/03/2025
The night is frozen in its long moment. The stars are frozen to night. Sooner or later morning will come to melt stars into pools of light and clocks into time. There will be voices speaking of the loneliness of clocks and cold stars.
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georgeszirtes.bsky.social @georgeszirtes.bsky.social · 01/03/2025
FIRST DAY OF SPRING The first day of spring spreads its palms to receive light and buds and first growths. How keen the world is to expand into itself, to full ripe blossom and mild temperatures. Demons of frozen nights have nowhere to go but there where it's coldest.
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georgeszirtes.bsky.social @georgeszirtes.bsky.social · 28/02/2025
There used to be a country called America.
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georgeszirtes.bsky.social @georgeszirtes.bsky.social · 27/02/2025
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Bloodaxe Books @bloodaxebooks.bsky.social · 20/02/2025
Our February books are out today! New poetry books by Belgium's Charlotte Van den Broeck, Romania's Ana Blandiana, & Hungary's Krisztina Tóth (trs @georgeszirtes.bsky.social). Our online launch event featured readings and discussion from the poets & their translators. youtube.com/live/SiYFLYP...
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georgeszirtes.bsky.social @georgeszirtes.bsky.social · 24/02/2025
After the rain After the rain stopped they stepped out into fresh air. Air was what they breathed, sharp as blades of grass, multicoloured like the day. Always there’s something to hope for and this was as good as it would get as if the earth could spin faster, spin free.
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georgeszirtes.bsky.social @georgeszirtes.bsky.social · 17/02/2025
Evenings, Midnights Those empty evenings when time sits on its bare hands and closes its mouth. Those evenings waiting for a midnight that never arrives. Those evenings when world holds its breath hoping history turns up with gifts of kindness so long overdue.
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Paul Connolly @thepaulconnolly.bsky.social · 17/02/2025
Across the two books, a wide range of forms are on show: sonnets, prose poems, abecedarian, villanelle, ekphrastic meditations. The #poets discuss how form and subject interplay. George Szirtes (@georgeszirtes.bsky.social) is particularly interesting on how a challenging form can unlock new meanings
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georgeszirtes.bsky.social @georgeszirtes.bsky.social · 13/02/2025
VAMPIRE CHOIR I’ve joined the Vampire Choir We only meet at night We constantly aspire To make our music bright We do have such fun making it Till someone puts a stake in it.
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georgeszirtes.bsky.social @georgeszirtes.bsky.social · 13/02/2025
GHOST TOAST I prefer Ghost Toast It doesn’t make you fat One calorie at most, Transparent and quite flat And when you come to chew it There’s nothing to it.
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georgeszirtes.bsky.social @georgeszirtes.bsky.social · 13/02/2025
GHOUL IN A POOL There’s a ghoul in the pool. I know him from school. He has work to prepare So he shouldn’t be there But he’s wild and unruly, Naughty wee ghoulie.
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georgeszirtes.bsky.social @georgeszirtes.bsky.social · 12/02/2025
From the book published by The Paekakariki Press in 2018, 67pp, I'm posting this to see if it is legible. These tales were composed of series of Tweets.
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georgeszirtes.bsky.social @georgeszirtes.bsky.social · 11/02/2025
Night Fields A few late cars cruise the Sunday street. A small town dreams cars and a moon that has to be dreamt into being. It lies down on its back, Venus above it, waiting for something like a taxi to ferry it home across the night fields.
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Rosanna McGlone @rosannamcglone.bsky.social · 11/02/2025
Yes, it's my book launch tomorrow 🤩🤩🤩 Totally free, but you do need to register. They'll be lots of amazing poets there @georgeszirtes.bsky.social @judithnangala.bsky.social Judith Beveridge, Anthony Lawrence, Jaya Savige, Sara Sarah, Mark Tredinnick, Audrey Molloy, and hiding in a corner, me 😅
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georgeszirtes.bsky.social @georgeszirtes.bsky.social · 11/02/2025
Polluters Somehow it mattered which way the words were facing. Wind blew between them, a hot blasting air that tried to cleanse them of all their uses. Polluters, screamed air, and tried to purge them, leaving the language vacant. But words roost like birds, glide air and fly home.
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georgeszirtes.bsky.social @georgeszirtes.bsky.social · 11/02/2025
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georgeszirtes.bsky.social @georgeszirtes.bsky.social · 11/02/2025
LAUNCH! BLANDIANA, TÓTH, VAN DEN BROECK The event will be available on Youtube on the evening. You are most welcome to be part of it. Just click on the link. youtube.com/live/SiYFLYP...
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Launch reading by Ana Blandiana, Krisztina Tóth & Charlotte Van den Broeck with their translators
YouTube video by Bloodaxe Books
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