Translations from Turkish

Translated from Turkish by George Messo. English only.

Published 2008. Paperback, 104 pp, 8x5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781905700738 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

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.

Translated from Turkish by George Messo. English only. 

Published 2016. Paperback, 336pp, 9.21 x 6.14ins, £14.95 / $24

ISBN 9781848614628 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

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

Translated from Turkish by George Messo. English only. 

Published 2016. Paperback, 200pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848614611 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Ilhan Berk (1908-2008) has been called a literary Midas: everything he touched turned to poems. New Selected Poems shows us the full linguistic range and imaginative power of Turkey’s greatest experimental poet. With a large selection of poems drawn from over 60 years of work, New Selected Poems offers a unique and indispensable portal into the world of Ilhan 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 was concerned with re-engaging a lost sensory world, then for many this volume will be a journey of discovery.

Translated from Turkish by George Messo, English only.
Published May 2026. Paperback, 84pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781837380350

Edip Cansever (1928–1985) was born in Istanbul. He grew up in a country transitioning from the Ottoman Empire into a modern Turkish republic. As a student of law and sociology he was widely influenced by Western modernism and Eastern mysticism. To the outside world, Cansever’s was an unremarkable life, spending most of it in Istanbul’s Covered Bazaar where he worked as an antiques dealer. It’s entirely fitting that a poet who came to define Turkish modernity should have made his living among the residues of its past.

          His extraordinary poetry speaks of familiar twentieth-century conditions, of rapid change, migrations and transports, of historical realities and ethnic diversities. His language mirrors the unique human landscapes of his city, a geo-political crossroads, of people dispersed by conflict and poverty, renewing themselves in a world unmapped.

          Cansever's poetics are marked by simplicity and depth. Often colloquial and irreverent, his accessibility belies the turbulent sexual and emotional undercurrents that run through much of his work. He’s off-hand and humorous just when he’s at his most serious. He can be profound and silly in a single breath. Central to Cansever’s poetic idiolect are the demands he makes on its linguistic resources, stretching the expressive capacity of language to breaking point, a kind of jazz, alive to its own fluid semantic possibilities and cognitive riffs.

Translated from Turkish by George Messo. English only.

Published 2009. Paperback, 168pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23.00

ISBN 9781848610668 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

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 Süreya and Turgut Uyar.

Translated from Turkish by George Messo. Bilingual edition.

Published 2011. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.

SBN 9781848611481 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

In just two short books, Gonca Özmen'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, Özmen's is a voice and spirit to be welcomed.