Paul Farley salutes George Szirtes, a worthy winner of the 2004 TS Eliot prize with Reel Paul Farley Saturday February 5, 2005

Guardian Reel by George Szirtes 166pp, Bloodaxe, £8.95

If the city, or a tiny corner of it, was the first place we knew, it is likely to form our notions of reality, and of home. We can lose this first city through the erosions and effacements of development or decline - cities appear to alter more quickly than the countryside. Or we can lose it more dramatically through flight and exile. We can lose them as utterly as a practitioner of Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art": "I lost two cities, lovely ones, and vaster". Yet the city can remain standing in the memory, as George Szirtes's Budapest does.

Szirtes's city is shady, indistinct, blurred at the edges, but his latest collection, Reel, also finds it furnished with closely examined things - a piano, a stove, a child's swing - as well as containing luminous, vivid moments beyond its boundaries. Already celebrated as a translator of modern Hungarian poetry, with Reel Szirtes has now won the 2004 TS Eliot prize for poetry (of which I was a judge). Long admired by his peers, it is to be hoped that this visionary formalist will gain new readers for his own work.

Szirtes's biography has become familiar through his writing over the past couple of decades. Profoundly affected by war - his mother survived a concentration camp, his father forced labour - in 1956, on his eighth birthday, the family crossed the border into Austria on foot at night, following the failed Hungarian uprising. They ended up on the south coast - from landlocked Mitteleuropa to seaside England - treated well along the way, almost as heroes at first: "Xenophobia isn't what it used to be". It would be unusual if such dislocation at such an age didn't present an enduring subject, and Szirtes has returned to his past, or rather his memory of it, repeatedly over the years.

One function of rhyme is mnemonic - for writer and reader - and Reel remembers by deploying end rhyme in almost every single poem. There are traditional shapes like the sonnet, of which in the past Szirtes has proved a deft sequencer, and the sestina, as well as more unusual items, such as "Minotaur in the Metro", which rhymes to its halfway point then back again in reverse, or "Wymondham Wings", which bifurcates Herbert's famous stanzas. There is much terza rima, the very devil of a form: as one door opens, another closes, and I'd suggest interlocking tercets with three rhymes is a bigger ask than sonneteering. It might be the relative paucity of rhyme in English compared to Italian, where everything seems to rhyme with everything else. It could also be the presence of Dante looming over the shape he patented. But Szirtes seems to have achieved lift-off and liberation, like that moment downhill cyclists realise they're being pedalled rather than pedalling. Narrative fragments and images and names come spooling out:

The city is unfixed, its formal maps Are mere mnemonics where each shape repeats

Its name before some ultimate collapse. The train shunts in the sidings, cars pull in By doorways, move off, disappear in gaps

Between the shops. It is like watching skin Crack and wrinkle. Old words: Andrássy út And Hal tér. Naming of streets: Tolbuhin,

Münnich... the distant smell of rotting fruit, Old shredded documents in blackened piles, Dead trees with squirrels snuffling at the root.

Rhyme here even acts as a guide to pronouncing those Magyar place-names in English. If the extent and success of terza rima in Reel distinguishes the book from earlier work, thematically old ground is revisited out of necessity. Szirtes's imagination often seems engaged in the act of rebuilding the city, as in the depressed dystopian "Retro-futuristic", where "there is nowhere to go except the future". There are recognisable shifts of scale and viewpoint, huge stepping backs like "Venice" - "Because there's nothing that will last forever / except perhaps ideas, I think of cities" - as well as immersions in art and cinema. Images and phrases, like his rabbit scuts and unshaven chins, recur both here and across books: perhaps all poets are attempting to find a home for those words or things they find indelible.

Szirtes has always been fond of ekphrasis, a kind of intense description of the visual artefact. As its name suggests, this kind of thing is as old as Homer, and the shield of Achilles, but cinema offered a moving image for writers to renegotiate with. On the other hand, film-makers as early as Eisenstein (writing on Dickens) have recognised how literature long prefigured cinematic conventions. Poetry and cinema can both be said to share a syntax and grammar of close up, jump cut, slow dissolve and flashback, but Reel is notable for the extent to which memory plays out as footage. The materiality of the medium is marked - "bells of the city chime, round upon round. / The film rolls on. A car sweeps round the bend" - and the title poem, which is itself stalked by a film crew, snaps shut "just as the reel breaks".

Whether the omnipresence of cinema and television, or the advent of what Louis MacNeice called "other, less difficult, media" represent a real threat to the written word or not, a part of me is always glad to see poetry keeping up. The appearance of The Matrix and Keanu Reeves (who once played Johnny Mnemonic) made me wonder whether the digitally manipulated image, the whiplash pan, will mark a truer point of separation.

If the cinematic century and its attendant iconography informs Reel, the book also has a classical dimension. As well as its formal organisation of sequence and eclogue, we encounter a mnemon, who would "forget his head if it wasn't screwed on", Sisyphus checking into a hotel, and Ariadne observed by the Eumenides. "Elpenor" is a tender lament for one of those archetypal sweet souls ("There were days he didn't shave / When his embrace was abrasive yet gentle") who wouldn't hurt a fly but come a cropper. You have to search hard for Elpenor down the back streets of the Odyssey, having as he does something of a walk on/fall off part in Circe's palace; though the hung-over young warrior who missed his footing on a ladder was once spoken of in familiar terms by Ovid, Plutarch and Martial, he is largely forgotten now.

Some of the book's most successful moments come when all of Szirtes's preoccupations work in concert, such as "Meeting Austerlitz", a poem-encounter with the late WG Sebald which has great sweep and sadness - "He would unwind / the world of memory and wind it up again / a little off-centre"; or "Sheringham", which must count as an early addition to the sub-genre of internet ekphrasis. The downloaded face of a school friend sharpens as if emerging from the sea on to Arnoldian shingle, and the poem goes broadband into a meditation on time and memory: "I watched a toddler in a red quilted jacket / teeter down stones making tiny forays // onto the black, wet, still sucked-and-licked / lowest tier of them, seeing time itself / contract into a chill in the vast derelict // expanse of the sea that swallowed up each shelf ... "

I wasn't at all surprised to find Szirtes has included three poems based on the work of Sebastião Salgado, that great photographic chronicler of human homelessness, exodus and migration. Even within our less urgent frame of reference, fewer and fewer of us live where our parents did. But for all the technical facility or speculative claims for context, the poems in Reel wouldn't work as well as they do had their arrival not been so deeply felt. "Forgetting is good," "Forgetting is wise," but Szirtes can't.

· Paul Farley teaches creative writing at the University of Lancaster. His most recent collection of poems, The Ice Age (Picador) won the Whitbread prize for poetry in 2002