ÃikiÅ by Güven TuranToplu Åiirler, 1963-1993 by Güven Turan

> I ^ I z I w H c*I D I H H < H * I w H H H I Q I O I * I one's existence/' she said in a recent interview, "an intellect creates its own treasure and secretly competes with inevitability." Thus, Plavi sneg invokes exten sivepsychological reflection, describ ing the change of "inexorable snow" to "sweet snow." It converts pain and cold to sweet knowledge, con templation to transcendence, as the blue color of the title suggests. All observations have the same direc tion and purpose as the snow: to hint at a time of peace, purity, and repose, toprepare human beings for another change in life. SvetlanaTomic Bethesda, Maryland Sabra Loomis.House Held Together by Winds. New York. Harper Perennial. 2008. xii + 84 pages. $13.95. isbn978 0-06-157715-4 At its best, Sabra Loomis's House Held TogetherbyWinds has a scintil lating, reverberant persuasiveness; at itsworst, it reads like solipsistic autobiography. One readily under stands why James T?te selected it for theNational Poetry Series; his own poetry could be described in thesameway, thoughTate's work is often simultaneously far more elu sive and more persuasive. There is a deep interiority to these poems, which are mostly set in a domestic theater of the past, populated by a grandfather,grand mother, uncles and aunts, mother, father. The point of view (often Dickensian) is one of a little girl turnedwoman, and this layeringof the two viewpoints (one informing the other) affords one of thebook's richestqualities. At thecore of these poems is a speaker looking forkeys tohidden rooms,hidden somewhere among the foldsofmemory. The best moments arise when thebook's imageryand metaphoric ity are expressed in succinct, clear mysteries, for example, "This stone house: a cradle, / balanced on green hill-waves" or "Separation: a nar row rope bridge / across a chasm." Two of the finestmoments in the book both come froma prose poem, "The Ship": "[The ship] was draw ing streamers,hundreds of colorful streamers after it; likea bird coming to rest on a hilltop, or a rainbow breathing the air"; and several sen tences later, "Drawing near the sun, theywere themselves again, with the great salt stars, tastingof grief. They saw the girth, the far edges of childhood, and labored to draw in the sky like a sail." This is fine poetry, and one wishes more of the poems would aspire to this level of interest. Unfortunately, many poems or passages within poems are novelistic or quotidian in theirdetail. One has no way of knowing, of course, but the poems sometimes feel self-indul gently autobiographical. This isonly a problem when thepoetry becomes more gratifying for thewriter than ^^^H forthe reader. Finally, at the level of ^^^H technique, the poems employ what has become the default rhythm of ^^^H contemporary prosaic freeverse: the ^^^H line as syntactical unit. This leaves ^^^H one very importantaspect of poetry largely underemployed and results ^^^H in rhythmicallyflat,sometimes even ^^^H dull, prosaic poetry. In this regard, ^^^H Sabra Loomis ishardly alone, yetwe are allowed to expect more. Fred Dings ^^^M University ofSouth Carolina ^^^M At the core of these poems isa speaker looking forkeys to hidden rooms, hidden somewhere amongthefolds of memory. G?ven Turan.Qki? Istanbul. Yapi Kredi Yayinlari. 2008. 58 pages. 4 ytl. isbn 978-975-08-1349-8 -. Toplu ?iirler, 1963-1993. 2nd ed. Istanbul. Yapi Kredi Yayinlari. 2008. 221 pages. 12 ytl isbn 978-975-363 A respected critic,novelist, and pub Usher, G?ven Turan started out as a poet, and itisas a poet thathe is still best known. Qki? (Exit) is the fourth book in his long poem sequence Gizli Alanlar (Hidden spaces). The Zen-like, "finger-symbol" poetics ^^^J and reclined, contemplative tone ^^^J are characteristic of the poet's later ^^^J IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIM 74 i WorldLiterature Today ^^^H of the measured breath, shunning orthodox meters for a more relaxed voice, one that explores?and skill fullyexploits?the rhythmicproper ties of natural speech with a precise and demanding ear: Summer windless unmoving leaves the eye unseeing the ear unhearing a quiver perceiving what The GizliAlanlar sequence reads like an extended minimalist mono logue, inwhich Turan induces rather than works the language, inscrib ing the physical limits of the page while summoning and invoking imaginative space beyond it. Qikis speaks of, and out of, the profound est silence?what Harold Bloom called the "dumbfounding abyss between ourselves and the object." The frequent "var/yok" dichotomy, signaling -presence and absence, being and nonbeing, belays the intricate metaphysics, the flowingof becoming and disappearance, union and separa tion,that give definition to Turan's unique place in contemporary Turk ish verse. Turan has that rare power of concentration that draws the small est details into the sharpest focus. Toplu ?iirler, 1963-1993 (Collected poems), now in its second edition, testifies to this constant wakeful ness to the world. In "Contradict ing," Turan writes: "Then winter comes / It snows / Scents die /We enteran insulatedworld / Suddenly / Between brown and grey / The sleep within us / Comes and goes / Shakes wakes / Embraces us." Pe? (Behind), fromwhich this poem is taken, written largely in Istanbul and Iowa City, forms a catalyst, a pattern of compression and image-drive that Turan revisitsand distills in the later collections, reaching its final, exact ing synthesis in Qiki? and the pro ceeding GizliAlanlar sequence. Economy of style has been a con stant with Turan, and theauthenticity of a voice freelyengaged in thinking poetically, unhurried and open, has become his standard. This isa poetry of incandescence, stripped of excess, foreign to artifice,which reaffirms G?ven Turan's preeminence among contemporary Turkish poets. George Messo Al Khobar, SaudiArabia Wiktor Woroszylski. Wiersze 1954 1996. Ryszard Krynicki, comp. Krakow. Wydawnictwo a5. 2007. 355 pages. z\ 29. isbn978-83-85568-86-5 Wiersze 1954-1996 is a new and gen erous selection of Wiktor Woros zylski's poems recently published by Wydawnictwo a.5.Woroszylski died in 1996 at theage of sixty-nine, and although his name is often men tioned in recollections of friendsand contemporaries as a leading figure of thePolish opposition during the communist period, latelyhis poetry has received less attention. Wiersze 1954-1996, selected by his friend and fellowpoet Ryszard Krynicki, is now making Woroszylski's poems once again accessible to a wider, younger readership. Woroszylski's career reflects the tortuous road of the young gen eration of writers who appeared right after the Second World War. They were the "pimpled ones," cul- E rural shock-troopers of the socialist E revolution, loudly proclaiming, as E indeed Woroszylski himself did in E one of his firstbooks, "There is E no death!" (Smierci nie mal). The E Mayakovsky-type fierce rhetoric E of the "Stalinist" period gave way E around 1954 to poems of reckon- E ingwith Woroszylski encapsulating E his deep disappointment with the E ussr in "Cztery zimy" (Fourwinters) E and in "Miasto" (A city), an eye- E witness account of the Hungarian E Revolution of 1956. In fact, visit- E ingHungary in the turbulent days E of October-November 1956 was an E important milestone in WoroszylE ski's development?his Hungarian E Diary, an objective description ofhis E experiences, became a classic of its E kind, published repeatedly in samiz- E dat. Itwas from this date thatWoro- E szylski was attacked as a "Revision- E ist" by communist politicians, and E although he returnedhis party card E only tenyears later,hewas clearly a E notable forerunnerof the Solidarity E movement of 1980. E In the 1960sWoroszylski wrote E an excellent novel, Sny pod sniegiem E (Dreams under the snow), on the E nineteenth-century Russian writer E Saltykov-Schedrin and was gathE ering material for a biography of E Mayakovsky, which was later trans- E lated intoEnglish. During thisperi- E od his poetry shifts toward a kind E of modernism that preferred free E verse and bold, often "linguistic" E associations to rhyming quatrains. E Human relationships now interest E him more than political platforms, E as illustrated in his poems about E love and also in the series ofpoems E on such famous people as Chaplin, E Kafka, the socialist poet Broniewski, E and the "old" Marx, to name but a E few. Interest in the persecuted artist E January-February 2009 i75 ...