Turkish Poetry Today 2017

This is the fifth volume in the Turkish Poetry Today series and presents once again an exciting array of the very best from Turkey’s rich poetic culture and heritage.

“Trying as always to break new ground, we invite you in this issue to accompany us on a journey through Turkish poetry that will include many voices never before heard in English translation...ˮ   from The Editors’ Introduction

Presented here in this edition’s Featured Poet section is Gülten Akɪn, whose intellect and writing have made her “the greatest living Turkish poet” according to a majority of Turkey’s leading poets, writers and critics.

Selections from the work of nearly twenty other Turkish poets in original translations alongside biographical notes make this a superb introduction for readers new to Turkish poetry or a further treasure chest for those who have come to appreciate how rich a vein of poetry there is to explore.

“Turkish Poetry Today brings us the unique flow, imagery and timbre of Turkish poetry, with translations that enable the works to sing for us in English. Truly memorable reading.ˮ     Dr. Robyn Rowland, poet

Turkish Poetry Today is a vibrant journal, up there with the best, its pages a journey of discovery through a wealth of poets in skilled translations, along with essays and reviews, and now a welcome extended body of work from a chosen poet in each issue. If there is an ‘otherness’ here, that too is welcome, even necessary. It is one that resonates, rooted in all of us. As one of Turkey’s most modern poets puts it, ‘You’re far from your country, I am in your country’, and again, ‘This is how I returned to Ithaca, of which I’d never heard,/ from which I’d never departed’.

Ronald Tamplin

Turkish Poetry Today 2016 published by Red Hand Books was my first volume of Turkish Poetry. Having been seduced by poetry translated by Neil Patrick Doherty online, I wanted to read more and to know more. A short but illuminating introduction to each poet's work makes this a fabulous collection for both new comers and connoisseurs. It gives readers a broad sweep across a tantalising range of Turkish poetry of the present and recent past. The substantial Featured Poet section - featuring Behcet Necatigil in this edition, gives the reader the opportunity to really feel immersed in one poet's oeuvre. This collection was a revelation to me. There is stunning beauty here, like Storks in the Moonlight by Ahmet Hasim, and there are poems made up of three lines that leave you breathless like Not a stir in the mind by Necatigil. Turkish poetry reaches places in the soul like no other.

Salma Ahmad Caller, artist/writer

Turkish Poetry Today is a gift to the English-speaking world and to Western poetic tradition more broadly. Those things we feel as vestiges sometimes detectable in our very best poems are fully fleshed and realised again and again in contemporary Turkish poetry. Wild strains incubating the ungovernable, its margins informing the centre, rooted in unsalted earth, Turkish poetry is a defence of poetry.

Chris Allen, poet