George Messo - Böcker

"Entrances" is the second collection by poet and translator, George Messo. The poems are heavily influenced by his years living in Turkey and they open up new worlds for the Anglo-American reader: lyric meditations on the Other, not travelogues. As Peter Didsbury said of this volume in manuscript: "There's a lovely spaciousness and sense of things and persons held in air. It seems to me that Messo is somehow bringing a whole region and set of cultures back into the European sphere. Any book which so beautifully invents for us the Choruh River and eleventh-century Georgia is OK by me."

The Middle East, both real and imagined, forms the background against which George Messo's third collection, "Hearing Still", shapes its recurring themes: silence, destruction, resistance, and endurance. The poems are, at times, as sparse as the landscapes they inhabit; fragile breaths quivering at the edge of worlds driven by catastrophe and restored by human dignity. Ranging through Turkey, Lebanon and Palestine, to the gravel deserts of Oman, and the desolate coastal plains of the Arabian Gulf, Messo's uniquely strange and illusive vision is at once mysterious and distressing.

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 Sureya and Turgut Uyar.

And here, where forest entrails spill into winter light, you find me, straying out from the forest's dark memory - Itinerant Hebrew poet David Vogel, Arctic explorer Samuel Hearne and surveyor David Thompson are among the lost voices re-presenced in George Messo's enigmatic new book, Violades & Appledown. Messo's vivid reinvention of history and tradition, passes through explorations of fractured time and the timelessness of memory into a powerfully realized present of ever changing perspectives, mindful of its journey out of the past.

On a remote forest farm in northern Sweden, the static of Lars Ruth's unsettled mind is fizzing. Voices. Sightings. Encounters, real and imagined, hint at a fractured and fragmentary life. Something is falling apart - something coming together.The Invention of Lars Ruth is an intimate, visionary exploration of psychic disquiet. Its themes, of remembrance and aloneness, spiral around an evasive, haunting figure. But who is Lars? His voice is the echo to a volatile mind, aware of its disintegration, fearful of imminent collapse. Only by re-imagining his place in the natural world and the mysterious creatures in it, can Lars Ruth secure his newly awakening self. George Messo's fifth book of poems is a richly inventive, candid reflection on the individual nature of mental distress; a darkly playful, bold new collection from one of Shearsman's most reticent poets.