Seyhan Erözçelik
1962-2011

Seyhan Erözçelik was born in 1962 in Bartin on the Black Sea. He studied psychology at Boğaziçi University and Oriental Languages at Istanbul University. In 1986 he co-founded the Siir Ati (Horse of Poetry) publishing house. Since his 1986 debut, he has published eight collections, including Kir Aği (Hoarfrost, 1991), Gül ve Telve (Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds, 1997) and Şehir'de Sansar Var! (There Is a Marten in Town!, 1999). His collected poems were published in 2003 and his latest book is Varidik, Yoğidik (Once We Were, We Weren't, 2006). He has also written poems in the Bartin dialect and in other Turkic languages, and has brought a modern approach to the classical Ottoman verse style, aruz, in his book Kara Yazili Meşkler (Tunes Written on the Snow, 2003). His translations into Turkish include the poetry of Osip Mandelstam and C. P. Cavafy. 

Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds

2010
Paperback
116 p.

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 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.

Translated from the Turkish by Murat Nemet-Nejat

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