Turkish Poetry Today 2017 - Softcover

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