Fresh Out of the Sky is a book of songs, dreams, laments, narratives
and comedies about major life-changes involving country, identity and
belonging.
It is about perpetually standing at the edge of change, anticipating it,
reflecting on it and dreaming about it. The title sequence of the book
returns to the terza rima theme of memory, following sequences in George
Szirtes' earlier books, such as those about early Budapest childhood
explored in Reel, and about growing to adulthood in England in An
English Apocalypse. Here the theme is arrival in England as a child in
1956. These are followed by the second part of The Yellow Room, a
continuing poem of impossible questions about identity as residual
Jewishness, in the form of a dialogue with Szirtes' late father.
After that there is a brief section of bridging poems set in the
aftermath of war, upheaval and life in contemporary England that leads
to Going Viral, a substantial section of ten-line poems, divided into
brief chapters, presenting dreamlike reports from the Covid bunkers we
have all been inhabiting and ending on occasions of consolation, delight
and joy in the midst of darkness and uncertainty. The book then moves,
by way of five interludes, from one dreamlike experience to another, in
the form of nine dream songs set in an unstable social and political
landscape. The last section steps from dream to a bestiary of
transformations woven through Guillaume Apollinaire and Graham
Sutherland.
