An English apocalypse

Plot

George Szirtes' `The Budapest File' (2000) brought together his poems about his Hungarian roots and experiences. This collection presents the poetry he has written from the other side, as an English Hungarian writer who grew up with ambiguous feelings towards his adopted home. His England possesses his imagination as powerfully as his almost unreachable, native city-disturbingly real yet also phantasmagoric, a spectral country living out its past, its people haunted by failure and disappointment. Over half the poems in this collection are completely new. In the powerful climax of the title-sequence, Szirtes imagines England's destruction in five apocalypses.