From his early surrealistic and painterly style of poetry to his growing interest in themes dealing with his native Hungary, George Szirtes has gained critical recognition as an important poet in the literary world. "People find Szirtes's poetry attractive because they recognise in it a basic understanding of human feeling and a proverbial sense of language," commented London Observer contributor Peter Porter. This appeal may in part be due to the influence of Szirtes's background and experience upon his poetry. "I arrived in England as a refugee in 1956," he told CA. "My early education was science based, but I began writing and painting at school. I studied fine art and travelled in Europe on a scholarship, the longest stay being in Italy. I was exhibiting pictures at this time, but probably the most important influence on my writing was the poet Martin Bell, who was one of my tutors. After marriage to the artist Clarissa Upchurch, and a brief but intense religious period during which I was baptised, I taught full-and part-time in various institutions." Armed with these diverse credentials, Szirtes has slowly made a place for himself among English poets.

The poet's work first appeared in magazines in 1973, the influence of his training as a painter making his writing saliently visual. "Szirtes chooses words like pigments," Peter Porter wrote in Contemporary Poets, "as though they could be modified in their mixing." However, some critics like Alan Brownjohn of Encounter felt that Szirtes's work is at its best when he gets away "from some habits of using the painter's eye for intriguing detail to get poems off the ground and employing a rather garish, surrealistic fantasy." The Slant Door contains much of this surrealism, but it also marks the point where the poet "moves very steadily towards a greater confidence, clarity, and originality of outlook," Brownjohn further remarked.

Szirtes told Porter in a Contemporary Poets interview that The Slant Door is structurally about the conflict between "the possibility of happiness" and the "apprehension of disaster," the two states of mind which he believes "define the territory" in which he best moves. Overall, critical reaction to The Slant Door was been positive. William Palmer of Poetry Review summed up the author's effort as "one of the best first books of poetry in the past few years, that is if we judge by successful poems and not by promise or critically adduced intentions."

November and May was, for Szirtes, a transitional book, one in which, as he told Porter, he concentrated "less on the finished object" and "more on the process of the poem." He told CA: "If I had to summarize my aims at the time, I would [say] that I felt my task was to preserve as fresh whatever was delightful and miraculous." A number of critics found the poems in the book to be grimmer and more morose than his earlier work. "Szirtes is more interested in evoking the sadness involved in attempting to explain than in offering explanations," commented Times Literary Supplement contributor Tim Dooley. His focus turns from the clearer, starker style for which The Slant Door was lauded for its "'mundane apparition,' the unattended moment of mystery or menace," as Alan Jenkins of Encounter described it. Szirtes's predilection for expressing disturbing ideas while maintaining a somber tone has been compared to that of Irish poet Louis MacNeice, while his love for the tangible has caused him to be compared to Geoffrey Grigson, a British poet. By contrasting the philosophical with the visually real, November and May and The Slant Door complement each other well.

With Szirtes's two visits to his native Hungary in 1984 and 1985, the poet rediscovered a personal subject about which to write. Short Wave, a book that contained more than Szirtes's usual number of love poems, began to "explore the idea and feel of Europe," explained the poet to CA. Porter remarked about this work: " Short Wave is a book of considerable accomplishment. Szirtes's voice is now completely his own." Though some critics like Andrew Motion of Poetry Review maintained that the book created a "sense of blandness when . . . considered as a whole," others like John Lucas of New Statesman asserted that " Short Wave is a truly original volume of poems. It is witty but in no superficial sense." While Short Wave was the first poetry collection in which Szirtes expressed an original voice by exploring his homeland, his next two books did this in even greater depth.

The Photographer in Winter deals largely with the Hungary of the 1940s and 1950s. It "offers a powerful epigraph and model of ancestral allusion," explained Books and Bookmen contributor Barbara Hardy. The collection covers almost everything that Szirtes associates with the Hungary of the past, from the title poem, which is about the poet's mother, to descriptions of Hungarian architecture and satires on politics and propaganda. Simon Rae commented in London Magazine: "Szirtes tends to see the past frozen into stone, petrified into a photographic image that cannot develop or be changed, but only assimilated—by art—into some sort of pattern." The central theme of The Photographer in Winter is about investigating, as Szirtes told CA, "the life of my mother before I was born (the time she spent in the Budapest ghetto and in the concentration camp) and relates this to the unhappy devotion she bore for her brother who failed to respond to her affection." Such themes, though personal, are written from a standpoint "unsettlingly poised between commitment and detachment," observed Lachlan Mackinnon of the Times Literary Supplement. Mackinnon continued by saying that The Photographer in Winter "contains an implicit criticism of much English poetry for its inwardness, its political isolation." But other critics such as Barbara Hardy did not see anything negative about Szirtes's dual identity. "He belongs with [his compatriots]," noted Hardy, "but he lends a strong voice to English poetry."

Szirtes again writes about Hungary from the standpoint of someone looking back in time in Metro, a book in which the poet uses the metaphor of the underground train as a vehicle for the narrative. The same woman photographer from The Photographer in Winter is revealed to be the poet's mother, and she becomes, as Mark Wormald pointed out in the Times Literary Supplement, "a guide on a journey through an unreal city of the imagination." She is also the medium through which Szirtes reconstructs "both the terrors of the Holocaust in 1945 Budapest and the cloudy details of his family's past." Mark Ford, in the London Review of Books, noted how the poem's narrative cuts between the poet's "own childhood memories of Hungary and the fates of various branches of the Szirtes family," as well as "his mother's love for a disdainful older brother, lost during the war, her courtship, and the circumstances surrounding her arrest." The 780-line title poem presents the Budapest of 1944 and 1945 reconstructed out of "relics, photographs, family gossip and chance memories," according to Ford, making the city a setting for "a generalized European urban chaos." Szirtes's technique employed both the television reporter's use of the quick-cut and the visual artist's use of collage in order to confront the reader with image and sound. Overall, critics like Ford found Metro to be "a rather somber book, with the tragedies of East European history felt in some degree in nearly all its contents."

In an interview with Contemporary Poets, Szirtes called Bridge Passages his "third 'Hungarian' book," which includes poems that are "the closest I have got to reportage in that they respond on a daily level to the rapid political change of 1989." Though Szirtes called it a "Hungarian" book, Bridge Passages also includes poems in which the poet explores how his immigration to England has affected him. In "English Words," he describes learning that "somehow it was possible to know / the otherness of people and not be afraid," and that naturalization is language-based, so that the immigrant works to "say a word until it loses meaning / and taste the foreignness of languages, / your own included." Stan Smith, writing in the London Review of Books, suggested that the title Bridge Passages "indicates a fine balance between connection and disconnection, a ubiquitous history and the trivia of everyday life," and that "in these bridge-passages of history, the fracturing of ideologies offers a brief chance of 'understanding what remains the same.'"

Blind Field found Szirtes returning to the theme of photography, a subject that "consolidates his very individual position in contemporary poetry," according to Tim Dooley in the Times Literary Supplement. The book is written in three sections, the first of which, Dooley explained, "postulates a hidden community, or 'blind field,' existing outside the frozen moment of the photographic images." The central section, "Transylvania," a long, two-part poem written in terza rima, details the poet's visit to his mother's home town in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. According to Dooley, "Transylvania" is "a bitter parody of pastoral and a sense of the tragic dislocation of a generation." The final section, "Blind Fold," shifts to a more personal and varied content, poems about the poet's wife and, Szirtes told Porter, poems about "immediate family histories." Blind Field, in Dooley's opinion, is "an interesting and worthwhile addition to Szirtes's work."

Selected Poems, 1976-1996 brought together poems that show the full range of Szirtes's work over two decades. Dooley called Szirtes "an insider's outsider," who has "cleared a particular territory for himself in ostensibly decorous poems which can startle with unanticipated perceptions." In his poetry Szirtes has explored his personal connections to Eastern European history and experience, but he is also esteemed as a practitioner of the English poetic tradition. As a poet who works in traditional forms, stanzas, and regular meter, he has produced serious long poems as well as short parodies and satires. Porter found that although "it is difficult to place Szirtes in the league of today's poets, serious readers . . . may have reason to believe that Szirtes's talent is one of the strongest of all."

In The Budapest File Szirtes organized his poems of Hungarian experience in chronological order by the history of his homeland, and discussed "the history of the circumstances that made my grandparents, parents, myself—even my children—what we are," he wrote in the volume's introduction. These poems portray the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Holocaust, the communist years, and the turn of the millennium, exhibiting "flashes of a dark, playful humor" in a "somberly powerful collection," according to a Kirkus Reviews contributor. "What is most interesting perhaps about this volume," wrote Alan Marshall in a London Daily Telegraph review, "is the conflict between Szirtes's attempts at a kind of 'photojournalistic' reportage . . . and the temptation for verbal play: the conflict, if you like, between the historian-spy and the elaborate code-maker." In An English Apocalypse, he puts himself into the minds of his parents, who imagine England as a refuge from communism. Yet the safe haven for which they long turns out to be much different than they imagined.

In addition to his work as a poet, Szirtes has established himself as an editor and award-winning translator of Hungarian poetry into English. According to George Gomori in the Times Literary Supplement, Szirtes has offered readers "fine English versions" of the poems of Imre Madach, Istvan Vas, Dezso Kosztolanyi, Otto Orban, and Zsuzsa Rakovszky. "Translation has been a second education for me, a kind of re-reading, a way of learning the possibilities of other voices," Szirtes explained to London Guardian reviewer James Hopkins.

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