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.

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."

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

'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.