First published in 2000, From the Pine Observatory introduces a poet of seductive range and power, carefully observing stillness, yet urging something to stir. Seldom far from the natural world, these poems in which transformation and metamorphosis recur as central themes, hint toward the mysterious in a voice as authentic as it is startlingly fresh. This third edition of Messo's rarely seen debut collection rescues the work of a fascinating but overlooked contemporary British poet.

On a remote forest farm in northern Sweden, the static of Lars Ruth's unsettled mind is fizzing. Voices. Sightings. Encounters, real and imagined, hint at a fractured and fragmentary life. Something is falling apart - something coming together. The Invention of Lars Ruth is an intimate, visionary exploration of psychic disquiet. Its themes, of remembrance and aloneness, spiral around an evasive, haunting figure. But who is Lars? His voice is the echo to a volatile mind, aware of its disintegration, fearful of imminent collapse. Only by re-imagining his place in the natural world and the mysterious creatures in it, can Lars Ruth secure his newly awakening self.  George Messo's fifth book of poems is a richly inventive, candid reflection on the individual nature of mental distress; a darkly playful, bold new collection from one of Shearsman's most reticent poets.

Unparalleled in the English language, The Book of Things, Ilhan 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, The Book of Things is a testament to the poet's undying appetite for engagement and renewal, his perennial call to awakening.

Orhan Veli Kanik (1914-1950), more commonly known as Orhan Veli, was a pioneering Turkish poet and one of the founding members of the Garip (Strange) movement. His innovative poetics wore a unique signature of austerity and accessibility. With arresting insight and playful irreverence Veli's poems transformed the Turkish literary world. When he died at the age of 36, he was acknowledged as one of the most important Turkish writers of his generation. Now, at last, this edition of The Complete Poems makes the full breadth of his achievement available in English for the first time. It brings together poems from the five collections published during the author's lifetime, as well as uncollected material from newspapers and magazines, and poems only published posthumously. The Complete Poems includes an informative introduction, endnotes, and chronology, placing the poems in their historical context and touching on many of the themes which shaped Orhan Veli's distinctive voice.

In essence fly-fishing has changed very little over the years. Angling Sketches, with its rich and intimate evocation of the lochs and rivers of Andrew Lang's youth, scattered throughout Lowland Scotland, speaks to us today in a voice as fresh and as entertaining as when it first appeared in 1891.

Ilhan Berk was born in 1918 in the Aegean city of Manisa. He once said "If a poem is written and goes out into the world, something in the world has changed." Berk's poems have been changing the world of Turkish poetry for the best part of seven decades. His innovative poetics have marked him out as one of the vital modernizing forces in contemporary Turkish literature and earned him a reputation as a literary enfant terrible, even an "extremist." Yet others deride his linguistic experimentalism as the work of a "French renegade." Few poets in Turkey today would dispute the significance of his work. Even in the year of his death, at the tender age of 90, more productive than ever, Berk remained a force to be reckoned with. [...] Berk's writing was a process of steady, careful refinement and, though his language never stopped changing, the vision remained remarkably clear. "The important thing," Berk tells us, "is to live the life of poetry, the writing always comes later."

Issue Two of the international bilingual journal of modern & contemporary Turkish poetry in translation. Featuring poetry by Lale Muldur, Guven Turan, Bedri Rahmi Eyuboglu, Asaf Halet Celebi, Melih Cevdet Anday, and Sami Baydar, in translations by Ruth Christie, Clifford Endres, Murat Nemet-Nejat, and more.

And here, where forest entrails spill into winter light, you find me, straying out from the forest's dark memory - Itinerant Hebrew poet David Vogel, Arctic explorer Samuel Hearne and surveyor David Thompson are among the lost voices re-presenced in George Messo's enigmatic new book, Violades & Appledown. Messo's vivid reinvention of history and tradition, passes through explorations of fractured time and the timelessness of memory into a powerfully realized present of ever changing perspectives, mindful of its journey out of the past.

Letters & Sounds is a multi-voiced selection of some of lhan Berk's finest love poems, elegies and lyric prose. Brought into English by poet-translator George Messo, these poems dance and sing with the energy and experimental daring of their dazzling Turkish originals. 'Poets of our time in any language ignore Berk's poem-its treasure trove-at their own peril.' MURAT NEMET-NEJAT 'One of Turkish poetry's most distinctive and necessary voices.' WORLD LITERATURE TODAY

A unique journal dedicated to modern and contemporary Turkish poetry in translation. Turkish Poetry Today features many of most exciting poets writing in Turkish today, selected and translated by leading translators from around the world. With translations and originals side-by-side, Issue One includes extensive new work by Bejan Matur translated by Ruth Christie and Selcuk Berilgen, Zeyep Koylu translated by Mel Kenne and Idil Karacadag, as well as poetry from Onat Polat, Necmi Zeka, Melih Cevdet Anday, and Murathan Mungan.

In just two short books, Gonca Ozmen's startling and arresting poems have earned her an unprecedented reputation in Turkey. Her mysterious, dream-like imagery and her fresh, restless approach to language mark her as a poet of rare ambition and intelligence. In poems whose power to mourn and remember love, to celebrate and reinvent the sensuous appetites of the body, enacts a subtle, exacting beauty, Ozmen's is a voice and spirit to be welcomed.With poems from all of Gonca Ozmen's published work, The Sea Within introduces us to one of Turkey's most significant young poets.

The Middle East, both real and imagined, forms the background against which George Messo's third collection, "Hearing Still", shapes its recurring themes: silence, destruction, resistance, and endurance. The poems are, at times, as sparse as the landscapes they inhabit; fragile breaths quivering at the edge of worlds driven by catastrophe and restored by human dignity. Ranging through Turkey, Lebanon and Palestine, to the gravel deserts of Oman, and the desolate coastal plains of the Arabian Gulf, Messo's uniquely strange and illusive vision is at once mysterious and distressing.

In the mid-1950s, a small but energetic group of young Turkish poets exploded into creative life. Their vivid, cosmopolitan experimentalism sent shock waves through the literary establishment. They became known as the Ikinci Yeni (The Second New). Inspired by surrealism and the contemporary European avant-garde, their influence was widespread and lasting-Turkish poetry would never be the same again. In this unique anthology, George Messo introduces broad selections from five of the leading Ikinci Yeni poets: Ece Ayhan, Ilhan Berk, Edip Cansever, Cemal Sureya and Turgut Uyar.

'Madrigals' is a collection of poems by Turkey's leading experimental poet, an 89-year-old still at the height of his powers. With spare texts, sometimes with only a few words to a page, this collection has a powerful meditative quality, even as the words trail away into silence and the whiteness of the page.

"Entrances" is the second collection by poet and translator, George Messo. The poems are heavily influenced by his years living in Turkey and they open up new worlds for the Anglo-American reader: lyric meditations on the Other, not travelogues. As Peter Didsbury said of this volume in manuscript: "There's a lovely spaciousness and sense of things and persons held in air. It seems to me that Messo is somehow bringing a whole region and set of cultures back into the European sphere. Any book which so beautifully invents for us the Choruh River and eleventh-century Georgia is OK by me."

Birhan Keskin's (b. Kirklareli, Turkey, 1963) poetry is finely-honed and minimal and at the same time, powerfully visual, evocative and exact. Meaning and music overlap, lines dissolve, restart and repeat. Fluid and elusive, her poems inhabit a space between cognition and remembering, testimony and invention. This book selects work from six of Keskin's books, including her prize-winning collection Ba, and George Messo's outstanding translation enables us to appreciate to the full the work of this exceptional poet.