Dirty August

Poetry. Translated from the Turkish by Julia Clare Tillinghast and Richard Tillinghast. Edip Cansever is an existential poet, not a historical poet. He seldem refers to his city's history, almost never mentions Istanbul's mosques, fountains and so on that Orhan Pamuk invokes, though perhaps it is to the city's disappearing grandeur that he glancingly alludes when he writes in "Precipice" of "A slowly burning brick barn / Hung with crystal chandeliers," as an analogy to how one's personality uses itself up in order to be reborn as something "I am passing out of my original form / by consuming it."