Review: Fog Bells: 8 Contemporary Turkish Poets (Dedalus Press, 2025)
“A writer’s life”, the poet Nick Laird once remarked, with a self-assurance befitting a Royal Society of Literature Fellow, “is a cycle of trying to get to their work, sitting staring at the blank screen, wandering off, steering their reluctant bodies back” to the desk where they compose – out of the ambient, affluent bustle of London or New York, where they live – a “pattern” on the page, to make sense of the “chaos of daily circumstance”. Given the apparently placid tenor of Laird’s own routine, such “chaos” would appear to be largely symbolic, or at least to unfold outside the pale of the writer’s bubbled existence, self-absorbed and self-admiring.
Sometimes, of course, the amiable sequestration of even the most punctilious of poetic solipsists can be disturbed: by disruptive riots or bad reviews, human rights abuses or pesky up-starts who have the audacity to care. It’s then that the holy guardians are called on to defend and re-sanctify the art, imperilled by a round of “daily circumstance” grown all too intrusive. To quote Ireland’s current Chair of Poetry, speaking in 2017:
Must poetry be louder, must it be more active, more politically and socially engaged? I can’t bring myself to believe that the answer to this is yes. Poetry’s response must be to remain true to itself rather than rush into rhetoric. Poems shouldn’t be about getting a point across.
Poetry’s right to be pointless, the poet’s freedom to shun the claims of political or social conscience: these are the resounding criteria, the engraven ingredients, of literary greatness.
We might wonder how such prescriptions would be received in Turkey, a country which, under the influence of Recep Erdoğan, has undergone a process of forceful “authoritarian consolidation” in recent years: the diversity of a multi-ethnic polity replaced by a top-down state “restructured along hyperpresidential lines” and specialising in “the mass persecution”of perceived “dissidents, who have been jailed in their thousands.” Where censorship and imprisonment are looming realities for citizens (including writers) who dare to ask questions – and even occasionally attempt to get their “point across” – it’s possible that the supposed right of poets not to think or care about very much beyond their own line-breaks would smack of empty-headed conformism, rather than the liberty its advocates pretend.
Perhaps post-doctoral literary scholars of the future will resolve such paradoxes and speculations definitively, for one and for all. For now, readers can occupy themselves with Fog Bells: 8 Contemporary Turkish Poets, a new bi-lingual anthology from Dedalus Press, carefully curated and translated by Istanbul-based poet, Neil P. Doherty.
Doherty’s versions pay tribute to the range and vitality of his chosen poets – spanning multiple generations, but all still in their literary prime. His own style becomes recognisable as the book progresses: each voice he presents has its own kind of under-stated wit and oneirc clarity, catching the rhythms of history in a vivider light. “The world is a saddleless horse”, observes Gökçenur Ç., “we try not to fall off”, though “we whisper ‘you couldn’t be real’ / into its ear.”
There is often a philosophical undercurrent surging just below the surface of these writers’ attentions, poem after poem, in the words of Cevat Çapan, “tirelessly / seeking for the roots of life itself.” The marginality and strange endurance of human yearnings become connecting threads in the expansive tapestry Doherty draws into billowing life. “This graveyard we call memory”, notes Elif Sofya, “grows and grows in our heads”, a “haunting of the body” now metamorphosed into words
Time and again, the richness and intensity of individual perceptions are balanced – granted weight and depth – by a galvanizing recognition of story-telling as a mode of shared (albeit frequently contested) consciousness. Gonca Özmen thus recalls and elegizes the victims of the Roboski massacre, carried out by the state military against a group of (mostly teenaged) Turkish civilians. “Branches entwined in a verdant forest” give way, in the poem, to “arms and legs entwined in an empty forest”, as a spectral crowd of grieving mothers assembles in the aftermath, “day and night clutching these soaking wet photographs”. Mustafa Köz, similarly, manages to hold the broken world, like a fallen teardrop, in delicate suspension: it “was for all of you that we exiles set out on the road at dawn”, he sings, “for the sake of these lands, crushed under bloody, iron heels.”
The full range of felt emotion – encompassing grief, joy, whimsy, longing – seems somehow distilled and honoured in this vibrant anthology. Among other things, its arrival may send a reviving gust of energy through the more insular spaces of Irish culture. Poetry’s horizons have always been broader than the comfortable confines within which many of our cliqued and sinecured gate-keepers have been content to keep it slotted. Its home is the world, and its journeys manifold – across languages and histories, alive with “the honour of carrying / This light.”