Randy Blasing

Mutlu Konuk Blasing

Nâzım Hikmet

The definitive selection by the first and foremost modern Turkish poet.

Poems of Nazim Hikmet

Written in free verse and employing such cinematic techniques as flashbacks, pans, zooms, dissolves, and jump cuts, this stunning 17,000 line novel in verse traces the fortunes of men and women during Turkey's change from an Islamic empire to a secular republic and exemplifies his vision of life as a communal experiment in creating a world in the image of our dreams.

An Epic Novel in Verse

Human Landscapes from My Country

Selected Poems of Nâzim Hikmet

Things I Didn't Know I Loved

Details the Turkish poet's early life as one of the Ottoman elite to his embrace of Communism that led to his spending most of his adult life in prison or exile.

The Life and Times of Turkey's World Poet

Poetry. Translated from the Turkish by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk. This is the first complete English translation of Hikmet's 1935 book that denounced the imminent Italian invasion of Ethiopia. It is this book that let the Turkish military to begin persecuting Hikmet for his anti-Fascist views. Three years later, the military would sentence him to 28 years in prison for his politics.

A Poem

Letters to Taranta-Babu

Lyric poetry has long been regarded as the intensely private, emotional expression of individuals, powerful precisely because it draws readers into personal worlds. But who, exactly, is the "I" in a lyric poem, and how is it created? In Lyric Poetry, Mutlu Blasing argues that the individual in a lyric is only a virtual entity and that lyric poetry takes its power from the public, emotional power of language itself. In the first major new theory of the lyric to be put forward in decades, Blasing proposes that lyric poetry is a public discourse deeply rooted in the mother tongue. She looks to poetic, linguistic, and psychoanalytic theory to help unravel the intricate historical processes that generate speaking subjects, and concludes that lyric forms convey both personal and communal emotional histories in language. Focusing on the work of such diverse twentieth-century American poets as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Anne Sexton, Blasing demonstrates the ways that the lyric "I" speaks, from first to last, as a creation of poetic language.

The Pain and the Pleasure of Words

Lyric Poetry

"Such a poet as Hikmet is beyond our hopes in this country. He is pure feeling. He writes our most private thoughts with a zest and love that makes us treasure them in ourselves. We learn to love ourselves through love of him, a poet who bestrides the world of man ever joyfully, even in dwelling upon his sorrows."--David Ignatow.

Selected Poetry

The Epic of Sheik Bedreddin and Other Poems

Hiding from secret police as he sets up an underground printing press, Ahmet, a Communist Party member, reflects on his friendships, his relationships with women he has loved, and the beliefs for which he is being pursued.

Mutlu Konuk Blasing

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