Poetry. Translated from the Turkish by Murat Nemet-Nejat. Seyhan Erözçelik's Gül ve Telve (ROSESTRIKES AND COFFEE GRINDS) is one of the major works of Turkish poetry in the last twenty years. In it, two strands of the Turkish culture and history come together. The "Telve" section, which consists of twenty-four coffee grounds readings, spins a Shamanistic yarn of hope and desire going back to Central Asian animistic traditions and bringing their language to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The "Gül" section, which also consists of twenty-four poems, creates stunning variations around the image of the rose—a central image in Islam and in Sufism—mirroring the "Telve" section, the two parts together making a poetent, poetic statement.
Author City: Istanbul TUR
Seyhan Erözçelik was born in 1962 in Bartin on the Black Sea, studied psychology at Boğaziçi University and oriental languages at Istanbul University. In 1986 he co-founded the Siir Ati (Horse of Poetry) publishing house which brought out over 40 poetry titles in 1980s. Since his 1986 debut with Yeis ile Tabanca (Despair and Pistol), he has published eight collections, including Kir Aği (Hoarfrost, 1991), Gül ve Telve (ROSESTRIKES AND COFFEE GRINDS, 1997) and Şehir'de Sansar Var! (There Is a Marten in Town!, 1999). His collected poems were published in 2003 and his latest book is Varidik, Yoğidik (Once We Were, We Weren't, 2006). He has also written poems in the Bartin dialect and in other Turkic languages, and has brought a modern approach to the classical Ottoman verse style, aruz, in his book Kara Yazili Meşkler (Tunes Written on the Snow, 2003). His translations into Turkish include the poetry of Osip Mandelstam and C. P. Cavafy. He lives in Istanbul.
“In Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry, Murat Nemet-Nejat established ‘eda’ as a marker of poetic process much as Lorca’s duende or the Japanese concept of yūgen had ignited similar interests in the century now behind us. The rootedness of mysticism in language, central to the poetics in question, finds a true exemplar in Seyhan Erözçelik’s ROSESTRIKES AND COFFEE GRINDS, a work of both intelligence & passion.”
—Jerome Rothenberg
“Seyhan Erözçelik’s ROSESTRIKES AND COFFEE GRINDS has three layers of narrative: first, the physical arrangements of rosestrikes and coffee grounds that the reader never sees; second, the fortune reader’s own interpretation of these casual arrangements through words; and third, the text that the reader simply encounters. All of these convergent layers unite in one point: what is said in the poem will be the reader’s own future or, more precisely, the objective future of the anonymous other.”
—Efe Murad