A Leaf About to Fall: Selected Poems(Salt Modern Poets)

İlhan Berk has been called a literary Midas: everything he touches turns to poems. A Leaf About To Fall: Selected Poems shows us, for the first time in English, the full linguistic range and imaginative power of Turkey’s greatest experimental poet. With over 200 poems drawn from more than half a century of work, A Leaf About To Fall offers a unique and indispensable portal into the world of İlhan Berk. Berk’s poems quiver and spark with a language always pressing out against its own skin: sensual, erotic, strange and intimate, relaxed and humorous; poems in which smells, tastes, sights, sounds, and touch become the preludes for a reawakening of history, the body, the very world around us. If Berk himself is concerned with re-engaging a lost sensory world, then for many A Leaf About To Fall will be a journey of discovery.

Table of Contents:
Context and Counter-Current: Introducing İlhan Berk Evening with a Sprig of Sweet Basil Poem for a Father Looking for His Lost Son Beautiful River What a Woman Sees Each Night from a Coast The Man Walking Along a Sunny Coast Old Boatmen Visiting the Beloved Wife of a Dead Poet Season of the Hunt Prologue I. The Hunt II. The Women III. The Rampart IV. The Child V. The Men VI. Upstairs . . . VII. Flow VIII. Me IX. Sefine Epilogue The History of a Face I. History II. Voice III. Exile Inscription on a Grave Dead I. On the Frontier of Pain II. Death III. About to Leave IV. Death was Scrutinized As if Death were a Daily Routine A Shoreside Coffeehouse The Men 28 Book of the Dead On the Painful Death of a Discoverer Conversations on the Life of an Exalted Person According to Ibn-i Hacer Heytemi An Old Salt The Women The Sea Book I. Chaws II. Threewells Street III. The City IV. Hay V. Those From Karya VI. Ecology For Homer Reading Li Po Sofia View Hamam Street In the Sea’s Wake Novembers A Street Leads Down to the Sea Arma Viriumque Cano I. Saturday Darkness II. Ramparts III. Little IV. Map of the Firmament V. The Gate of Ahmet I VI. Invitation The Grieving Stream There Have Been Trees I Have Made Friends With The Flower’s Indescribable Grief: Yellow Crocus Tree Yesterday I wasn’t at Home, I Took to the Hills Kizilirmak A Forest in the South Towards Evening Fern Garden Water Days I , II, III, IV, V, VI Death is Like Nothing Else Leaf Shadow Falls Across the Courtyard Stopping Goat Track As I Write Ashes and End What the Tree Says Trees Words II Blonde Haired Child Black Amber Saint-Antoine’s Pigeons I. Eleni’s Hands II. Youth III. Saint-Antoine’s Time of Lovemaking IV. Childhood in Fener V. Morning VI. Eleni Light VII. Sky from Woodcuts Steppe Yeshilyurt Street Country Life Sunset Sun Autumn III Picture Window Plane Tree Leaf Forest An Old Street in Pera Each Day I Walk from One End of a Market to the Other from Delta and Child Passerby Sage Clocks Quinces Autumn Birds Forest Tobacco Now as a Little Rose Goes through the World The Thames You I Woke Saying I Love You Three Times Thank You Istanbul Denizens of Hristaki Arcade I Don’t Want to Think Askelopis Rocks Rocks I Rocks II Rocks III Rocks IV A Turtledove Valantin Taskin Letters and Sounds Nevizade Street Greengrocer Ahmet Aslanoglu Whichever Angle We Take, Everything Explains Itself Paris Poet and Voices Afterword from The Secret History of Poetry

About the Author :
Ilhan Berk, one of Turkey’s most influential and innovative poets, was born in the Aegean city of Manisa. He was the award-winning author of more than two dozen books of poetry, as well as volumes of critical and biographical prose. He was also an acclaimed visual artist. Berk lived for much of his life in the town of Bodrum where he died in August 2008. George Messo is a poet, editor and teacher, and one of the world’s leading translators of Turkish poetry. His many books include A Leaf About To Fall: Selected Poems by İlhan Berk, which was shortlisted for the 2007 Popescu European Translation Prize. His most recent book of poems, Hearing Still, and his groundbreaking anthology İkinci Yeni: The Turkish Avant Garde are published by Shearsman Books. He is the former editor of the international journal Near East Review.

Review :
After more than half a century of poetry, Turkey’s Grand Old Man of literature is still its Enfant Terrible. … one of Turkish poetry’s most distinctive and necessary voices.