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 sprawling ecosystem of Turkish letters. In his sweeping familiarity with the numerous poets he mentions by name, we catch a glimpse of a poetic tradition largely unavailable to English-language readers. Often considered something of a poet’s poet, he sees poetry in every small moment, and turns it into mystery
'[...] a warm and engaging book, fills a long-neglected gap for readers of Turkish and world poetry.'
Read the review in full on the Modern Poetry in Translation website
