Earthly Conditions opens with a most earthly experience, very early morning, the birth of a day, first light anticipated but not yet arrived:

it’ll wave like a lilac curtain behind the mountains

then with the speed of light—yes, the speed of light—it’ll enter

the dull room through the belly of glass calmly, quietly

as if it were there to stay forever unchanging

a door will stretch itself open to another

the sound of tea in the kitchen will begin brewing

As with any birth, there’s expectation and certainty about how it will happen. There’s humor as well—yes light does move with the speed of light! The expected light will open a door, then another—to the sound of brewing tea, ordinary and mystical, both. Water boils in the kettle, tea is spooned into the pot, water poured—but what is the sound of steeping, of waiting? The stage is set for arrival. And in the poems that follow, Birhan Keskin and her translator Öykü Tekten bring us again and again to thresholds, the poems open doors and invite us to step across and in.

This edition of Earthly Conditions contains poems selected from five of Keskin’s previous collections, including Earthly Conditions, Twenty Coated Pills, Ba, Y’ol, and Cold Excavations, published in Turkey between 1999 and 2010. As she writes in the introduction, Tekten selected these poems in consultation with the poet and worked closely with her on the translations. This is the first time the award-winning Turkish poet’s work has been published in book form in the U.S. Previously, a selection of her poems, & Silk & Love & Flame, translated by George Messo, appeared from Arc Publications, UK.

Harnessing the power of compression and relatively simple diction, complex harmonics emerge from this work. Resonances abound: after-chords, after-images, echoes. An urban poet, Keskin nonetheless centers the natural world, finding affinities, corollaries, other selves which express what the human-self alone cannot. 13th century poet Yunus Emre is an influence upon Keskin. Unfamiliar with Emre’s poetry, I heard other resonances:

A sunny road runs through the mulberries,

I’m at the window of the prison infirmary.

I can’t smell the medicines—

carnations must be blooming nearby.

It’s this way:

being captured is beside the point,

the point is not to surrender. (Hikmet, p. 135)

Mulberry trees with light running through them, carnations emitting their fragrance, Hikmet is drawn to energies the non-human world sends out. In a sense he does surrender, to light, trees, and flowers, just as Keskin does to the more-than-human beings, the plants and other entities her poems engage. She is captured by these but not imprisoned. There is more than one world in the world.

Poems in this collection look to various tiny creatures: ant, larva, spider, gastropod, vulnerable creatures easily crushed by accident or on purpose. “i hear the world through the dew on my belly/each of my feet point in a different direction,” the speaker of the poem Spider tells us. These poems do pull us in different directions, but we are never lost.

The poem blend experience. In Spider, the experience is at once of spider and of human: “my soul’s pendulum throws me/onto the white horse of bravery, or sucks me/into a venomous fear.” So a spider swings from her thread and so the human-self acts through bravery or fear, depending. Vulnerability can be a source of courage. Memory weaves a web, absolutely necessary for the spider’s survival. A spider’s memory is inborn. For humans, memory is both inherited and made from experience, and though sometimes a cruel taskmaster, it’s crucial for survival. Image and compression align, spider and human merge.

Memory is threaded into the fabric of these poems. Rather than clearly elucidated, detailed recollections, Keskin is interested in after-images, not the sun itself going down but the afterglow on the hills. Not the specific memory, but that the emotional body retains it, and seeks reenactments and expression through poems. “let no one know the sorrow on my path/let it grow expand wrap itself around my life/its door has long been shut, its window crossed,” prays the speaker of Ant.

The poem enacts memory through image: the patient, passionate making of “ember-laces” on the forest floor. The making of “ember-laces” in turn suggest the making of poems.

“we’ve entered winter and exited,” the ant-speaker tells us. Another set of doorways, into and out of winter’s separation, coldness, fatigue, desolation. Through a long world the journey is made: “folded, curled, opened out like a sheet/a life is enough to make a path….” A sheet for a bed, a sheet of paper, perhaps a shroud. The ant writes its journey with a trail of scent, the poet with words.

The poems selected for this volume are remarkably connected but never in facile or predictable ways. The poem Snail, from Keskin’s 2002 collection Earthly Conditions, opens “The stone within me stirred,” and we immediately wonder what stone exists inside a snail? Ancient knowing, inheritance, recognition? Perhaps the stirring of voice: “if i fell silent, so would the world.” The poem Stone, from the 2005 collection Ba, picks up this thread. Here, the stone is “the oldest one here/…the belly of the world….” The stone, the thing which, if thrown, can shatter what it touches, but can also, itself, be broken open: “if you break it open…the whole world appears in every speck of me…//my tongue a long echo.”(p. 71) This shift, from object—it—back to subject—me, is curious, isn’t it? As if the speaker is simultaneously outside and inside the self. Or, she is many selves. I hear Blake’s grain of sand, Whitman’s every atom. The stone contains multitudes. As do Keskin’s poems.

The poems enter other realities as well, those of larger entities and energies, landforms and landscapes: mountain, desert, glacier, taiga, lake, sea. These, too, hold memory, experience being, have voices. “i don’t want the word to be spoken, the depth to be damaged/i am a collector of memory with not much space,” the speaker of Lake informs us. The damaging word might come in the form of permission granted to dump mine tailings into a lake. Or perhaps it’s the word spoken in anger or with malice that troubles the depth of a human soul and remains held in the body. The lake within, the lake without. In both, words have power to harm.

Throughout this translation, the speaker-self is indicated with a lower case “i,” a choice which emphasizes the merging of human and other-than-human. The i-self moves deftly, dexterously between states, slipping into and out of various selves. The “i” self is perhaps multitudes. Not constrained by the ego-self, it accesses the precognitive, the ancestral, what connects the human to everything else: “who cracked me open, who was a lover to me?/…i came to the world to ride horses/was it the end of march or february/roses were planted in the earth/who planted my blood?”

In the poem Sea, the speaker “wanted the smell of roses/the joy of almonds//ah, i didn’t know how immense i was/i wanted arms to fall into.” Does the apprehension of immensity belie the desire for contact? Not exactly. The speaker seems to want it all: depth, dimension, and the sensuality of roses, almonds, arms to fall into. I’m reminded of Lorine Niedecker: “We are what the seas/have made us/longingly immense//the very veery/on the fence.” (Niedecker, p. 240) Human consciousness, these poets remind us, sits astride the threshold between transcendance and imminence.

Keskin is also attentive to the human-made: courtyards and the plants therein—almond and fig trees, wisteria—and of the doors and doorways we pass through into and out of different spaces.

The poem Door makes space for the door itself, its bewilderment and questioning:

i opened closed opened closed and i saw as many

of those who came as those who left

where is the end of patience, the sad donkey, the heedless pomegranate

where is the garden?

Doors and the humans that pass through them are conduits. In the poem, the door’s “rusty key” is the speaker’s tongue. Others have come and gone yet remain in memory. Paradoxically it’s the knowledge of separateness that opens the door to union. This poet sees the world as one: door and doorway, memory and presence: “i am a piece of cloth tied around a branch,” a line which echoes Hikmet’s “embroidered linen handkerchief” tied “to a pine bough for luck.” (Hikmet, p 262) The cloth, the handkerchief, meaning to say remember, i was here where you are also. Keskin’s cloth and Hikmet’s handkerchief reach beyond the poems to us.

Consciousness is a doorway between what came before us and what will come after. In Keskin’s poem Tunnel, not included in this collection but translated by George Messo, the speaker lays claim to a knowledge born of attentiveness and receptivity: “in time’s fragments/they reckoned me a shiver/and yet…//I understood the water turning to ice in its own hole,/the road’s sorrow.” (Keskin/Messo, p. 65) The roads, the lives these poems trace, have witnessed and felt grief. They also know resilience: “i am defeated, forgotten/but not sad,” asserts the speaker of Homo Sapiens, and

the human is a sentence

between the edge of the sky and earth

and always right

just so it can say “i am here”

while hidden inside this matter called life

Note the word “matter.” It’s a brilliant choice suggesting at once the body, which in a sense hides the soul, and everything solid which is not the self, and also the “matters,” whether important or trivial, of which a life is made.

Often, we stand at a threshold between alienation and connection, stepping one way then the other: alienated from the world, connected to it. These poems are themselves thresholds where a human self meets the selves of other beings and other ways of being. “i was so many one day” says the speaker of Flamingo II. A flock, yes. But as well, appearing near the end of this collection, we remember all the others the poet and, with her, the translator have been: mountain, desert, lake, caterpillar, wisteria, etc. Energies co-mingle, and through this commingling, those of us lucky enough to have this book land in our hands—in Turkish, in English—are enlarged, become many, or recognize the many we have already been and continue to be.

Other works cited:

Hikmet, Nazim. Poems of Nazim Hikmet. Translated by Randy Blasing and Munil Konuk, Persea Books, 2002.

Keskin, Birhan. & Silk & Love & Flame. Translated by George Messo, Arc Publications, UK, 2013.

Niedecker, Lorine. Collected Works. Edited by Jenny Penberthy, University of California Press, 2002.