selected poems

About the Book

The poet has published nine books of poetry in Turkish.

Four of these are of “word seed”, brief poems somewhat similar to  “haiku”, and one is of “haiku”.

As may be seen in the contents page, the poems in this book come from four of the other books of poetry published in Turkish and from an unpublished file.

In time, they range over a period of twenty-five years.

The title is “selected poems”. But there has not been a “selection” in the precise sense. The determining factor has been the matter of translation. And, in the translation of poetry, the context and the connotations are crucial.

Thus, this book rather contains what the poet himself could manage to translate.

About the Author

A peasant boy in hard conditions. At times he walks to school barefoot, in snow.

 At teacher training school, he learns English by himself.

He receives a grant, gets his BA in the US.

Attracted to Zen, he starts to do judo.

He learns of “haiku”, in brevity, similar to Turkish folk poem, “mani”.

As part of his concern with utopias, he goes to a mount to write one. He delays the utopia and goes to mountains with university students, for more than ten years.

 By then he is a professor of English literature, and has published books of poetry in Turkish.