Publisher's Synopsis
Poetry. Translated from the Turkish by Murat Nemet-Nejat. Seyhan Erözçelik's Gül ve Telve (ROSESTRIKES AND COFFEE GRINDS) is one of the major works of Turkish poetry in the last twenty years. In it, two strands of the Turkish culture and history come together. The Telve section, which consists of twenty-four coffee grounds readings, spins a Shamanistic yarn of hope and desire going back to Central Asian animistic traditions and bringing their language to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Gül section, which also consists of twenty-four poems, creates stunning variations around the image of the rose--a central image in Islam and in Sufism--mirroring the Telve section, the two parts together making a poetent, poetic statement.
