Mapping the Delta

By George Szirtes

Poetry Book Society Choice.

The Delta is a densely populated place. Whole countries inhabit it, exercising their powers and authority, presenting their offers of complicity and compliance. Individuals move through the night and come upon themselves in its mirrors. Dreamers and fantasists repopulate its hidden corners: Rimbaud, Bruno Schultz, William Blake, Arthur Schnitzler and the physicist Dennis Gabor lay claim to their own visions of it.

Animals gaze at their human companions who gaze back. They try to puzzle each other out, looking to climb into each other’s eyes. They court each other, desire their own species, are captivated both by each other’s and their own beauty. Life goes on its desultory way, finding itself between creeks and cracks. And occasionally the world does crack open. Planes crash, boats sink, weather changes, floodwaters rise, people vanish on journeys. Anxiety remains: disaster zones persist into old age and death, and into the life, death and resurrection of language itself.

At the core of the book is The Yellow Room, a sequence of mirror poems contemplating the Jewishness of the poet’s father. The room constricts and glows. The poem breaks up across the page at intervals then reassembles into its mirrors.

Many of the poems are formal haiku sequences. They are new parts of a personal Delta. Others are in rhymed and broken stanzas. The Delta has to survive – if it survives at all – on its broken patterns.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Oct 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781780373218

Book preview

GEORGE SZIRTES

MAPPING THE DELTA

Poetry Book Society Choice

The Delta is a densely populated place. Whole countries inhabit it, exercising their powers and authority, presenting their offers of complicity and compliance. Individuals move through the night and come upon themselves in its mirrors. Dreamers and fantasists repopulate its hidden corners: Rimbaud, Bruno Schultz, William Blake, Arthur Schnitzler and the physicist Dennis Gabor lay claim to their own visions of it.

Animals gaze at their human companions who gaze back. They try to puzzle each other out, looking to climb into each other’s eyes. They court each other, desire their own species, are captivated both by each other’s and their own beauty. Life goes on its desultory way, finding itself between creeks and cracks. And occasionally the world does crack open. Planes crash, boats sink, weather changes, floodwaters rise, people vanish on journeys. Anxiety remains: disaster zones persist into old age and death, and into the life, death and resurrection of language itself.

At the core of the book is The Yellow Room, a sequence of mirror poems contemplating the Jewishness of the poet’s father. The room constricts and glows. The poem breaks up across the page at intervals then reassembles into its mirrors. Many of the poems are formal haiku sequences. They are new parts of a personal Delta. Others are in rhymed and broken stanzas. The Delta has to survive – if it survives at all – on its broken patterns.

‘A brilliantly virtuosic collection of deeply felt poems concerned with the personal impact of the dislocations and betrayals of history. The judges were impressed by the unusual degree of formal pressure exerted by Szirtes on his themes of memory and the impossibility of forgetting’ – Douglas Dunn, on Reel, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Cover picture: Mapping the Delta by Clarissa Upchurch

GEORGE SZIRTES

Mapping the Delta

For Clarissa, children and grandchildren

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications in which some of these poems first appeared: The Ecchoing Green, ed. Richard Skinner (The Big Blake Project, 2015), Hwaet! 20 Years of Ledbury Poetry Festival, ed. Mark Fisher (Bloodaxe Books, 2016), Interlit Quarterly, Maghreb, Manhattan Review (USA), The Messenger, numerocinq, Ploughshares (USA), The Poetry Mail (India), The Poetry Review, Prague Review, The Rotary Dial, The Stare’s Nest, The Times Literary Supplement, The Rialto, and The Woven Tale.

Some poems were published in an Eyewear Aviator pamphlet, Notes on the Inner City (2015). The sequence The Mathematics of Freedom was commissioned by Poet in the City and Archives for London for an event at Imperial College in December 2014, while ‘The Drunken Boat’ was commissioned by the Rimbaud and Verlaine Foundation. ‘The Matrix Reloaded’ was read by Patrick Stewart as part of a Voices for Choices literary event organised by Campaign for Dignity in Dying in May 2013.

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

MAPPING THE DELTA

Mapping the Delta

In the Cinema Lobby

Central Europe

Bartók

The Thirties

Blessed Isle

Postcolonial Operations

Patriarchs

After a line of W.H. Auden

IN DEFENCE OF CLICHÉ

Man at a Bar

In Defence of Cliché

What we talk about when we talk about talking

Insomnia

Assault

SPLEEN

Spleen

The Boy-King’s Tale

Laughter

Meet Harpo

In the Country of the Heart

Minimalist

Charge Sheet

When the wicked come…

Eden

Minimenta: A Topography

A DRUNKEN BOAT

The Drunken Boat

Slum

Conneries

Royal Street

In the City

At the Corner of the Table

Prudence

City Snapshots

BRUNO SCHULZ, SHE SAID

Bruno Schulz, She Said

On Angels

Nine Meditations on Francesca Woodman

Like That Raw Engine

JUKEBOX

A Hard Day’s Night

Island of Dreams

Sealed with a Kiss

Needle in a Haystack

You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling

Shine On You Crazy Diamond

Nowhere to Run

IN WOLF’S CLOTHING

The Wolf Reader

A Paradise Garden

Among Animals

Animal Inside

BLAKESONGS

The Ghost of a Flea

A Vision of the Daughters of Albion

Nurse’s Song

The Sick Rose

Nine Annotations to The Proverbs of Hell

COURTSHIP

Courtship

On Beauty

What she told me about beauty

Magic Realism

Silver

In the Hotel Room

Overheard

Devious

Illicit: A Dream Story

Mottoes from Schnitzler

ANXIETY

Ghostlight

On Getting Lost

At the Train Window

The Engine Turns

Naming and shaming

The Leaves

Glass

Variations after Sappho

It Never Quite Goes, the Sense of Anxiety

The Voices

THE YELLOW ROOM

DISASTER ZONE: FLOOD

Event

Surge

Listening to the weather

Umbrella

But

Wreckage

A Dream of New Washing

THE MATHEMATICS OF FREEDOM

Hologram

The Definition of Liberty

Small Change

Beef

Nutritional Value

Eternity

The Instruments

Hologram as Light

DISASTER ZONE: THE MISSING

Disaster Zone

A Low Flying Plane

Runway

The Missing

Lament

Singular

Backspace

Cargo

The Books

STILLNESS

Stillness

Ice Cap

Maghreb

THE HOTEL OPENS

Chord and Ornament

A Flowering

South

A Quartet from Finland

A Note on Photographs

REMBRANDT

Rembrandt

Bright Room

Nothing

Room with a View

Filming Death

Mourning: a sketch

The Matrix Reloaded

FORKED TONGUES

Caedmon

Polyphonic

A Close Run Thing with the Police

Leave It to Us

Good Dog Voice

A SMALL BOOK OF MELANCHOLY

Who Crouches…

Tritina

A Small Book of Melancholy

A Hungarian Folk Song

A Photograph

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

Mapping the Delta

Mapping the Delta

For several months we had been moving down

the river when it broke into tight channels,

shores suddenly closer, a smear of green and brown

with a smattering of fishermen among runnels

silent then gone. It was disorientating

at first. We were drunk on the local wine

and unused to drifting around and waiting.

We were lost without landmark and sign.

And then a new channel opened and a craft

much like ours appeared and pushed ahead.

And then another. Everywhere fore and aft

there were boats and water that fed

still more water. We were everywhere

and nowhere at once in the humid air.

         *

Who can define the river? Who can own

the stream as it moves, as it keeps breaking up

swollen by tributaries. Can anyone drown

in its confluent jargons or make the river stop

to admire itself? The cities it passes through

are habitations of only one kind. I’ve lived there

and walked embankments that were once new

but now are old. They were not an everywhere.

It was maps we needed to locate the voices

of the delta with its birdcalls and inflections,

the marshy ground that lay between places

that were solid with the chattering of fictions.

The boats were full of faces feeding the ocean.

The water moving, becoming the location.

         *

Phalarope, egret, grebe, pelican, bittern

and heron, flamingo, spoonbill, ibis, names

of familiar fauna, the familiar pattern

of speech, the well-mapped language games…

We had endless supplies of thick black coffee

to keep us going. We spread out the maps

and named more fauna, strophe after strophe,

the