George Szirtes has often described his own poems as buildings, and Clarissa Upchurch's paintings in this volume reflect architectural structures-the Eclectic, Secession and Art Deco buildings characteristic of Budapest. Behind the disciplined and carefully balanced static façade, the pictures and the poem are highly dynamic, filled with motion, emotion, agitation, action and colour. The poem recounts a day, from early morning to night, running parallel with the shooting of a movie ("Film crews / Shoot Budapest for Berlin", because "The city rhymes / With its imperial neighbour, like one bruise / With another"). It is the quest for narrative, a thread that holds all those scattered images together, that confronts the viewer. The thread eventually turns out to be a reel of film and the narrative nothing less than the story of time in its process of passing. "Today is history", the poem closes, and the emphasis is on both words.
The book carries us along like a river, an element that is always the same but never similar: a film of pulsating images and the flowing music of poetry. As Szirtes has a painter's eye (his unique imagery has been much praised by critics), word and image are in perfect rhythm. Both are full of agitated voices: "car sounds, radios", "car door slams", "odd stray" words, the "scutter" of feet, the "whisper" of statues, "wind ruffling the embankment trees", the sound of trains and cogweel railways, the chimes of bells-even "the fine spray of rain breathes evenly"; in Upchurch's pictures there are always people and cars in motion, creating sounds for the eye and speaking to the viewer. Even more, to the mindful observer the houses themselves will speak:

on balmy afternoons you walk for miles
Trying to listen to the architecture.
It mutters continually, waving dusty files

Of unsolved grievances.

Something is always in process here: Budapest's history tries to speak, and it needs impartial but compassionate observers to record it.
Szirtes and Upchurch had spent almost a year in Hungary in 1989, at an exact turning point of history when communism was crumbling away. They watched a change of regime, one of several that happened in twentieth-century Budapest: "Here all the clocks tell different times. / All the statues point different ways." They were both deeply influenced by this experience of transition and their observation of another culture: the painter has used the city as a topic of her pictures for more than fifteen years, and the poet began to write the poems that were to be included in the volume of poetry The Budapest File (2004), which (together with books such as George Gömöri's My Manifold City) introduced Budapest as a topic in British poetry. The late Eighties was the era of "old shredded documents in blackened piles", the change in the "naming of streets: / Tolbuhin, Münnich...", the time when people met on the squares where there was "never any lack of news".
The poem and the pictures, though, do not try to pinpoint one single historical moment. Instead, they seek a narrative which fastens together all the happenings of the place. They are not holding onto any single moment, nor are they deceived by slogans or political monuments; they know that the "city is unfixed", and the enduring has to be sought in the transient; their only alignment is to the truth, the speech of "cracked angels" who can sing for both place and people. This "reel" of pictures and words does not advertise anything, except perhaps the beauty of light.
Yes, light, which is one of the most temporal things in a city which "glories in its element", and which itself works as a detached observer, impartial to anything or anybody, creating a "visual sub-plot" of a "peculiar imperative": the "sparkingly authoritative language" of truth. The paintings almost always contain a wedge of "the familiar sky" above the buildings, a wedge which seems to be a shade of enduring blue, in spite of the constant movement and shadows of cars and people below.

The poem shows with striking precision the real life of the inhabitants living and dying here, regardless of the time when they lived. For their life is still present in the persisting structures of architecture:

Here is a square where everybody meets.
Here is a doorway through which troops have pressed.
Here is a yard where women hang sheets

And corridors where boys in Sunday best
Are waiting for a housekeeper or maid
To join them on a stroll in the soft west

Wind ruffling the embankment trees.
Decade After decade resolves itself in the traffic.

"Art is a house that tries to be haunted." Emily Dickinson's epigram is one of George Szirtes's favourite sayings. Budapest is haunted, these words and pictures about Budapest are haunted too: one image evokes another, standstill evokes motion, echo evokes sound, and the faceless, phantom-like people of the paintings evoke living, breathing, talking persons, each one telling his or her own story, waiting for us to listen. Thus "Reel" becomes "The Waste Land" of Budapest, a city "before some ultimate collapse". (Appropriately, the collection for which it was the title poem won the T.S. Eliot Prize, praised by the judges as a "a brilliantly virtuosic collection of deeply felt poems concerned with the personal impact of the dislocations and betrayals of history".)
This film does not have a fixed narrative, only personal interpretations: "The city offers you no evidence, / Except the collage", while still "something true survives" in the "dark corridors and courtyards"; an artist can "draw out the sound" of the dead "in terms of light". Both Szirtes and Upchurch have the special gift of being able to speak for the dead, to fix something that is otherwise fleeting for generations to come. Just as Tony Harrison speaks for the lost people of Leeds or Douglas Dunn for the inhabitants of Terry Street, Szirtes and Upchurch here speak for the lost people of Budapest, hearing the echoes of the past. "Echo is the natural speech of the region" says George Szirtes in the accompanying essay. This kind of moving architecture (in other words, the film of their joint creation), conserves and links the scattered images and gives us the hope of watching it over and over again and thus to try and find the narration which moves it. The poem always evokes some new echo of feeling, and the picture Direction, for example, which at first sight can be interpreted as a ghost walking down the street, against the traffic, soon becomes the story of a detective watching us viewers, recording our every movement. The original documentary about ghosts thus becomes a mystery movie, and the viewer accompanies Szirtes and Upchurch in this "city of readings" on their quest for truth.
The Budapest film is, therefore, a mystery story; but as it advances, it not only records the crimes history has committed ("Dull monuments express regret / ... for crimes committed in names they're trying to forget"), but it also points to a higher level of mystery, the relation of the world to its supernatural organising element. And this is nothing less than lost narration itself, the personal myth George Szirtes is looking for, something that has led him from his Genesis ("a narrow / Bedroom that served as my Old Testament") through his Exodus to England back to Budapest again; something that seems to organize the puzzle of life into a unified picture, revealing the meaning of the "masquerade" (this absurd dumb show of a foreign city) as well-known, something which can be understood and accepted. Without the "imperative" or the "evidence" of this truth, all things, as Szirtes' essay states, slip into chaos, "because their meanings can no longer support the narratives we demand of them."