Vellum Publishing is a new independent publisher based in Manchester, currently launching an intriguing list of poetry and non-fiction with a focus on internationalist and Muslim voices. Vellum’s first three poetry titles are Dismantling Mountains, a collection of meditations on social justice from American poet Samantha Terrell; Seven Men I Know: a pile of poems and short stories, an anthology of Turkish writers translated and edited by Mevlut Ceylan; and Only Words, an unofficial ‘New and Selected Poems’ of the British-Canadian Sufi poet Paul Sutherland, which includes his compelling narrative sequence Poems on the Life of the Prophet Muhammad: Peace Be Upon Him. The books reveal Vellum’s intent to become a significant new publisher in the British poetry landscape. Paul Sutherland’s work will be given a full review in a future issue of Critical Muslim.
Samantha Terrill, Dismantling Mountains, Vellum Publishing, Manchester, 2023.
Mevlut Ceylan (ed.), Seven Men I Know, Vellum Publishing, Manchester, 2024.
In Dismantling Mountains, Samantha Terrell takes an often-aphoristic approach to the moral questions broached by everyday life. Short reflections on human frailty, social inequality and life’s vicissitudes, written with a light touch and pleasing musicality, at their best Terrell’s poems offer readers a delicate yet potent blend of spiritual poetry and social critique. Well-aware of her position of privilege, she never takes it for granted. The ‘embarrassed’ parent in ‘Poverty’ comments:
Your child
Has no bath
While I scold mine
For too much splashing on the floor.
So much excess,
What’s it all for?
Far from handwringing rhetoric, however, this question stems from Terrell’s deep commitment to global justice. The simple and memorable ‘World Peace’ concludes:
I wish the world for my child.
And what I wish for my child,
I wish for the world.
Elsewhere, she astutely narrows her aim. In ‘Of Peace and Pocketbooks’, she’s a suburban spoken word poet, deploying a sharp use of slant rhyme from behind her white picket fence to take shots at media complicity in America’s military industrial complex:
… And I’m not the first
to say it,
But I hope I’m not the last:
That the business of war
Is the biggest
Perpetrator
Of all and, lest
We somehow
Forget it,
Our regular news
Retains the rights to its sponsorship.
She also clear-sightedly turns her targets on herself and her community. ‘Life-Preservers Fail Us’ concludes:
There’s a striking
Lack of diversity
In your group
Discussing cultural sensitivity
But everyone’s giving accolades
For your platitudes.
I guess these are
Our life-preservers.
When reality’s too painful,
We see what we want to see –
Allowing the truth to
Give way to mediocrity.
Aware, however, that possessing a political consciousness can dampen one’s love of life, Terrell also celebrates creativity and joy as sources of self-empowerment. The carefully balanced ‘Accommodating Enthusiasm’, deserves to be quoted in full:
Nerves and bird songs intertwine,
Giving voice to inner-feelings –
Previously stored up
Songs locked in lungs
I make manic notes
In the margins of my mind,
Already rationalizing
Why I had resented the birds,
Why I had denied them my song.
The tension between singer and monkish annotator plays out in throughout the collection, in poems that often comment wryly on history and theology, though at times can be a little too much ‘on the nose’. In its laudable attempt to distill our similarities to each other, ‘Equality’, for example, smooths over vital questions of human difference. More subtly observed is ‘Shark Bait’, which sees through distracting attempts to divide us into ‘sharks and minnows’, ultimately warning:
Beware instead, of
Quiet, still seas
Since the absence of conflict
Does not equate to the presence of peace.
Not a new insight – the final quote is credited to Nelson Mandela among others – but a well-placed allusion that develops the collection’s reflections on peace as an active choice always in need of renewal. The majority of Terrell’s poems are well-worth returning too, for their uplifting reminders that, while the path through life is a rocky one, as the opening mythological poem ‘To Rise’ concludes, long ago:
… humankind discovered
A task for which they were uniquely suited –
Picking themselves up again, since picking things up works best with opposable
Thumbs and a yearning soul.
Seven Men I Know is a beautifully crafted tribute to seven contemporary Turkish writers, offering short selections of their work skilfully translated by Mevlut Ceylan, each prefaced by a short biography and an intriguing illustration by Hasan Ayın. The introduction by Rogan Wolf thoughtfully sets the cultural context for this labour of love by Ceylan, himself a poet of note living in self-imposed exile in London, who in his long commitment to translation and small press publishing ‘has made much good of his otherness, his emissary role’. On this occasion, Ceylan has gathered seven late writers, showcasing their considerable talents and whetting the reader’s appetite for more. One hopes that interest in this volume might lead to a fuller anthology, including the voices of women and younger poets. But as a personal homage to writers one assumes were Ceylan’s friends and colleagues, Seven Men I Know gives a tantalising introduction to a generation of Turkish poets, essayists and fictioneers concerned with Islam and modernity, East and West, and, like creative writers everywhere, the tragedies and tensions of everyday life.
Nuri Pakdil (1934–2019) was a versatile writer, a playwright and poet best known for his highly accomplished essays. In Ceylan’s lean translations, his aphoristic couplets demonstrate a keen, roving intellect, and a careful, catlike tread. In a few short words, ‘Pure’ bodies forth the gravitas of prayer:
The deep voice descends
in the form of silence.
The theme of religion develops with reflections on Mecca and eternity, while elsewhere ‘Flames’ is a witty title to conjure with:
He says that there is his fancy,
as he comes closer she hurries away.
Sezai Karakoç (1933–2021) was a ‘pioneer of Turkish literature’ who founded his own publishing house and drew on classical Islamic poetry to explore contemporary tensions. His long narrative poem ‘Of the Father and His Seven Sons’, a title that resonates with the structure of the anthology, has an enduring appeal of a lyrical folktale. One by one, the father’s sons leave for ‘the West’. Seduced by fame, unrequited love, money and power, education, wine they are murdered, lost, forgotten, even including the poet:
Reciting his poems in deserts
he was dissolved as grains of sand on the roads
Only the seventh son, travelling after his father’s death, resolves to redeem this tragic situation. His actions bring into focus a sharp contrast between the restless change of ‘the West’ and the spiritual steadfastness of ‘the East’ – an opposition one might consider geopolitically reductive, but as a metaphor for faith, retains relevance and power.
Erdem Bayazıt (1939–2008) was a poet, editor, academic and member of parliament. His poetry, though, floats miles away from political rhetoric. Here is work that draws from the well of faith to water human frailties. There is a gnomic quality and disarming vulnerability to his brief lyric poems that draw the reader back to ponder their imagery. In ‘Farewell’ the speaker laments:
People are as alien to me as hearts of stone
Trees lining the street will be sentenced without me
How can I hear a lute
describing the loneliness
of my window
Bayazıt’s long work ‘The Book of Poems (Fragments)’ contemplates death with equanimity, however. The speaker, strengthened by the ‘peace of prayer’, seeks:
… like gushing water,
the earth and heavens,
this side of the world and the other,
night and day,
The Book that has been read,
The Book that our heart desires to read.
Akif İnan (1940–2000) was a lecturer, social activist and much awarded poet, regarded as a leading voice of his generation. From the evidence here, his mercurial lyricism certainly sets him apart. The ghazal is a difficult form to translate, given its intricate structure, and while I can’t vouch for the fidelity here (not knowing Turkish or even being able to see the original), Ceylan’s version of ‘Ghazal (2)’ suggests an innovative freedom with the form
Before your eyes touched my heart,
O İstanbul, where were those birds?
Sea is my tongue’s lexicon;
songs, my brother, where were they?
In the ghazals and elsewhere, İnan also had the gift of expressing the intense intimacy of faith. At least it is hard to imagine a human lover with the power of ‘You’:
Your eyes are everywhere day and night,
you are every climate and each word is yours,
your devoted hands are in my palm,
your scent would fill my lungs.
Only to be with you, to be with you,
I believe is the finest thing of life.
Alâeddin Özdenören (1940–2003) worked with other poets in the anthology as an editor and publisher, and won the 1996 Writers Union of Turkey Poetry Award. He was especially known for his poems in memory of his son, Kerem, who was killed in an accident. ‘Mountain’, ‘Unaware’ and ‘Kerem’s Satchel’ all lightly lift an unbearable load:
in the depth of your satchel
little birds have made their nests
your satchel was very heavy my son
but what a lovely weight that must have been
no sadness in you when you carried it
Longevity is sadly not a hallmark of these seven writers, four of whom died under the age of seventy. The loss of Cahit Zarifoğlu (1940-1987) was surely deeply felt, but in a short life he covered much ground, working as a translator, teacher, and journalist, founding a publishing house and literary review, and latterly working on children’s literature. While ‘This Era had no Tail or Head / It was Simply a Blur in the Mud’ exhibits a disturbing eroticism, other poems read – in a sophisticated twist – as work written by children for adults. In the clever ‘Daughter and Father’ the daughter very much gets the last word:
just be quiet will you
here is another balloon
don’t burst it
OK?
daddy
don’t tell me that
tell it to the balloon
just say
don’t burst
OK?
Rounding off the anthology are flash fictions by Rasim Özdenören (1940–2022), Alâeddin Özdenören’s twin, a much-awarded novelist, essayist and one of Turkey’s most prominent short story writers, translated here by David Boxen and Mevlut Ceylan. With its insomniac stream of consciousness, the first of the stories, ‘The Pussycat’, could qualify as a prose-poem. A slice from the middle give a flavour of this brief, beguiling piece:
One begins to hear silent voices, unknown melodies. You can compare every sound to the sound of anything. That hour of the night anything is possible. Old man Faulkner thought of Berlioz’s music which he heard in Jardin du Luxembourg as Tchaikovsky spread on a slice of stale bread. This means that the time the master enjoyed most was during a breakfast unwillingly eaten.
The other, slightly longer tales, have an elusive, parable-like quality that chimes softly with the spiritual themes of the poetry in the book. Though it is the troubled thoughts of ‘The Patient’ that conclude the book, one imagines Ceylan, the loving ambassador, nearing the completion of Seven Men I Know, and lingering on the ending of ‘Between Two Stations’:
Ah, I have come to the crux of the matter.
I was here. We were together. We used to board the train together. But two people boarding a train do not always take the same route from then on. This was something like that. We made the journey together, but our routes thereafter diverged.
At times in the short biographies of these creative men, tense shifts from past to present. This does not feel like an error. Writers become their writing; and in that sense are always with us. Their work is a mesh of past, present and future, drawing people together across languages, continents and years. Art too is such a dissolver of time. Special mention must be made of the line drawings by Hasan Ayın, which playfully, in fascinating detail and Escher-like repetition, interweave the motifs of nib, quill and bird throughout the pages of the anthology: enduring emblems of the writing life etching tribute to men whose souls have now flown. [/restrict]