Poetry RSS

And another great review! This time for Pomegranate Garden by Haydar Ergülen on World Literature Today: 'Ergülen has a broad poetic range. Pomegranate Garden features works from 1982 to 2019. Pomegranate Garden delights in prose poetry, symbolism, free verse, narrative, premodern classicism, and the occasional mystic spiritual. But arguably, Ergülen best succeeds at what Parker notes as his “down-to-earth concerns of humanity itself.” In his poem “Borrowed Like Sorrow” (2005), he writes, “Mornings are tough / much more so than poetry.” His quotidian commentary becomes profound in his elegy to the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, written the year he was assassinated....

Editor and translator Caroline Stockford reports on the intricacies of translating and editing the Turkish poet Haydar Ergülen's work in her blog for New Welsh Review. 'Haydar was here this autumn in England and Wales for the launch of his first book of poetry translated to English, to read his work and to share his thoughts with us. I, for one, am grateful that Haydar is a visible poet, that we have the chance to translate, to meet and to hear the abdal, the dervish, going slowly along his way. We, as his thirteen translators and three editors are extremely...

Roberto Pastore published his first full collection of poetry, Hey Bert, with us in October. He was recently featured in the Western Mail's Author's Notes and here is the interview with Jenny White in full: Tell me a bit about yourself – where you grew up, how you came to Cardiff, when you started writing poetry. So I grew up in and around Milton Keynes, England, we moved around a lot growing up. My family comes from Italy, my father lives there now. My poem Show Homes is about my parents fondness for looking around houses. It was the era of...

HomeAs if we would never arrive,we check our watches and connections.So many elsewheres as wewalk into abandoned roomsthat somehow have forgotten us.A window propped, half-openon a garden, stares. A birdas if to say, you’re here,glances its wings against the blueso far away, then becomes invisible.How they call to us, the lost places.Now I carry my life, as a snail might,slipping across grass and stone:the shrugged contours of her shell’s light spiral,the glistening of her bridal train.Like a half-remembered song,marking us, making us,words call us back, they call us on.To know the world in another languageis to never know the world...

A Thousandfold Loving: Derick Mattern reviews Pomegranate Garden by Haydar Ergülen, edited by Mel Kenne, Saliha Paker, and Caroline Stockford, Parthian, 2019. 'Haydar Ergülen is the most prominent of a group of poets that emerged during the 1980s in Turkey, an era woefully underrepresented in translation. Drawing on some forty years of work, this selection of nearly eighty poems is the first volume of his work – and the first major work of his generation – to appear in English. 'A poet of deep affections, this selection highlights Ergülen’s love poems, his summer poems, his nostalgias, his constant connection to the...