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Biographical note: İlhan Berk, one of Turkey’s most influential and innovative poets, was born in the Aegean city of Manisa. He is the award-winning author of more than two dozen books of poetry, as well as volumes of critical and biographical prose. He is also an acclaimed visual artist. Today Berk lives in the town of Bodrum.
Biographical note: George Messo is a poet, translator, and editor. His books include From the Pine Observatory (2000), Aradaki Ses (The In-Between Voice, 2005), Entrances (2006), and Avrupa'nin Kucuk Tanrilari (The Little Gods of Europe, forthcoming 2007). He is the editor of Near East Review.
BIC Basic
EAN13: 9781844715237
ISBN: 9781844715237
Author: İlhan Berk
Title: The Book of Things
Series: Salt Modern Poets in Translation
Product class: BB
Language: eng
Audience: General/trade
BIC subject category: CTCH1
Publisher: Salt Publishing
Pub date: 01-Dec-09
Extent: 240pp
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 22 mm
Weight: 360 gms
Supplier: Gardners Books
Supplier: Ingram Book Group
Supplier: Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability: NP
Price: GBP 14.99
Price: USD 26.95
Rights: World
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Short
description/annotation: Mud, bras, slugs and doors – Berk sings them all in this twisting, labyrinthine song of the strange and sensual, by turns playful and surprising, learned and hilarious; beautiful and unsettling in its quirkiness.
Main description: Unparalleled in the English language, Book of Things, Berk’s uniquely compelling lyric trilogy, is an uncommon meditation on the inner life of common things. Mud, bras, slugs and doors – Berk sings them all in this twisting, labyrinthine song of the strange and sensual, by turns playful and surprising, learned and hilarious; beautiful and unsettling in its quirkiness.
Berk’s tireless journey into the unknown, Book of Things is a testament to the poet’s undying appetite for engagement and renewal, his perennial call to awakening.
Table of contents:
Acknowledgements
Translator’s Note
THINGS THAT COUNT THINGS THAT DON’T
things that count things that don’t
Things
Lire
water
Water, I
I Saw Water, II
Water, III
stones
Stones
works & days
Book of Works & Days
O Diligent Like an Apple
Golden Oriole
Identity Book, Unbelonging
four silent texts
Table
Roundness
?
Neyzen Tevfik
things that count things that don’t
Slug
Tree
Gloves
Rubbish
Bra
Mud
Sparrow
f
Naked Feet
Dot / Dash
Page/ Paper / Pen
sentences I
Sentences, Here I Come!
sentences II
Night Looks to the East
the book / the work
The Book / The Work
Halo
Basilica
LONG LIVE NUMBERS
I
II
III
Summation
HOUSE
house I
I
II
a grand metaphor: house II
spirit of the house III
house as a family IV
door
Door
room
o Room
window
o Window
wall
Wall I
Wall II
Wall III
Wall IV
Summation
garden
Garden
little gods of the house V
Threshold
Stairs
Ceiling
Roof
Balcony
HOUSE
A Typographic Interpretation
Notes
A Guide to Turkish Pronunciation View excerpt as PDF:  Click here to view a sample ( KB)
Excerpt from book:
Rubbish
Thing that once had an identity, was once useful, a thing suddenly robbed of usefulness, stripped of its identity:
Rubbish.
That’s how rubbish is.
Can’t stand on its own two feet like a lamp, a chair, a table, a rock etc. (rocks stand up on their own), stupefied, cannot be saved from constant change, metamorphosis
a pitiful thing.
It has no colour, no shape and yet comes and goes in all the shapes and colours there are; it takes on every form, every shade.
An alloy.
One that’s seen everywhere, is unavoidable, sticks to our feet, is thrown away, kicked about, despised:
Homeless and rootless.
That is, but shouldn’t be.
Dog-like.
Cursed.
(Does it say ‘The world is full of demons’?)
Like all other things it’s silent, serious minded (serious mindedness, silence are particular to things; gradually they form a family:
A family of things that do not count).
That’s the way it is, but a snapped button, an old slipper, a handkerchief, a sock are magical.
Like all objects too it’s attractive, haloed.
An ascetic.
A melancholic.
(Besides, rubbish and a melancholic aren’t such different things: They’re like each other.)
With the soul of a monk.
Empirical.
Expects nothing of this world.
As if, like Diogenes, it says “I ask only that you leave no shadow.”
A metaphor.
Acrid.
(Isn’t the world a metaphor too?)
Rubbish is lyrical.
Unpublished endorsement: Ilhan Berk stands as a towering paragon of modern Turkish poetry. In a protean career that spanned more than seven decades, he was virtually an industry of innovation, a lifelong avant-garde poet – social realist, surrealist, imagist, obscurantist, absurdist, also a practitioner of concrete verse and found poetry. He explored traditional Turkish aesthetics and experimented with a panoply of innovative European techniques. The result was a supreme poetic achievement.
Turkey’s poetry aficionados are grateful to Ilhan Berk for his scintillating syncretism and to George Messo for these faithful and artful renditions. Talat S. Halman |
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