Last week I've read two books, both of which managed to leave me with conflicting feelings.

Let's talk about the first one.

Beyhude

The first book I've read this week was Beyhude by Ali Karabayram. It's a short poetry book, which was gifted and recommended to me by someone whose taste I trust. It's a thin, elegant book with a nice cover design which incorporates an especially eye catching typography for the title of the book, though it's hard to infer meaning behind the logography. Might I say, this was an indicator for what's to come, and another point towards my always judge a book by its cover philosophy (I promise we'll talk about this someday soon).

The book opens with some quotes, first being from Sait Faik Abasiyanik which excited me greatly, as his only poetry book is one of my favorites when it comes to Turkish poetry. Moreover, with the short but beautiful Felix Culpa as the opener, my excitement only grew. As a lover of Romanticism, the melancholic and sublime mood it sets really gripped me. However, this excitement would not last.

The book is presented in essentially two sections, the unnamed first section consists of five poems each including the aforementioned Felix Culpa. These five poems are the main course, the four after the first each spanning over 10 pages and about a dozen stanzas. This section is then followed by the appendix, which is made up of eight shorter poems, a couple pages and stanzas each.

Of the four longer poems, two are written free-form, while the other two follow an almost prose like structure. The second poem in the book, Kral Yolunda Bir Gezi (A Stroll on the King's Road), is one of the free-form ones. This poem sets a precedent of style for the rest of the main poems which I wished to be done with while reading, which unfortunately would not come to pass. Gone are the effective descriptors of Felix Culpa, replaced by long, winding sentences wherein every noun comes with five adjectives, picked intentionally from the most obscure, opaque wording available. The free-form structure also doesn't help, and over the course of a dozen stanzas, it's easy to lose track of the themes. In most of the poems, but moreso in Kral Yolunda Bir Gezi and its kin, it feels like the poet is flexing his thesaurus-like vocabulary, and while it definitely adds to the imagery and style, it detracts from substance severely. The poems feel beautiful themselves, but they failed to make me feel any type of way as they unraveled page to page, and the last stanza usually left me more lost than anything else.

The shorter poems however, like Felix Culpa and those in the appendix, are quite the treat. The appendix section definitely acted like a palate cleanser for me. The plays on structure, the more obscure and dense wordings work in favor of these as it's easier to hold the entire poem in memory and process it as you read.

All in all, this book was a roller-coaster with the highs being high, and the lows being low. I especially loved Felix Culpa (If you couldn't tell already) and Sey, and quite enjoyed some others, but half the book left me scratching my head, hence my conflicted feelings about it. Though I cannot say I'm not glad to have read it.