The Burning of the Books and Other Poems

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 often associated with the Nazis' actions 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 F. The poems follow and expand from the events of Canetti's book in a variety of forms not previously used by Szirtes.