About the Work by Neil P. Doherty

A craftsman with a singular dedication to the art of poetry, a voice that has consistently sung the concerns of the neglected and downtrodden, and a multifaceted artist shaped both by his own tradition—poets such as Nazım Hikmet and Hasan Hüseyin—and by international voices such as Ritsos, Brecht, and Neruda, Mustafa Köz might well be compared to a quiet underground river that flows, often unseen, through modern Turkish poetry. His stylistic range is vast and varied, moving from delicate lyrics that evoke the landscape of the Aegean and its islands to more strident verse marking the turmoil of Turkey’s political crises. His concerns, however, are never parochial, as he has extended his gaze to Arabic-speaking West Asia, Latin America, the North of Ireland, and East Europe. One of the poems presented here, “The Art of Poetry (I),” might well be seen as a manifesto for his work and beliefs. Poetry is no mere game, no collection of pretty words cleverly assembled yet signifying nothing. If it cannot, as he says, “make a flower bloom / in the dreams of the dead,” then possibly it might be better left unwritten.

Indeed, the other poems here clearly illustrate this belief. “In the Mornings as the Sun…,” taken from his collection Uyandım, Dünya Diye Bir Yerdeyim (I Woke Up in a Place Called the World), is dedicated to the Cumartesi Anneleri / The Saturday Mothers, the mothers and spouses of those disappeared by the state since the 1980 military coup. The poem highlights the dignity and grief of those who have constantly searched for a single trace of their beloved, only to be greeted with silence and contempt. While “In Praise of Tyranny” reflects the turmoil of modern Turkish life, it also speaks in a universal voice, naming the darkness into which the world has sunk over the past decade.

The Irish poet Michael Hartnett once wrote, “poets with progress / make no peace or pact: the act of poetry / is a rebel act.” Throughout his writing life Mustafa Köz has embodied that conviction, ensuring that his voice has never ceased to challenge those forces which seek to silence and repress.

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MUSTAFA KÖZ was born in Niğde in central Turkey in 1959. He studied business administration, journalism, and law, and worked as a journalist. His articles and essays have been published in magazines and prominent newspapers. He has served on the boards of numerous literary magazines and festivals. He has been politically active throughout his writing career and since 2014 has served as the vice-president of the Turkish Writer’s Union. He has published eighteen collections of poetry as well as children’s poetry, textbooks, aphorisms, and critical essays.

NEIL P. DOHERTY, originally from Kildare, Ireland, resident in Istanbul since 1995, is a translator of Turkish prose and poetry. His translations have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry Wales, The Dreaming Machine, The Honest Ulsterman, The Seattle Star and The Berlin Quarterly. Together with Gökçenur Ç. he has translated Bearing Witness to the Age. Selected Poems of Behçet Necatigil, published by Antonym, India in November 2025. His anthology of Turkish poets has also just been published under the title Fog Bells: 8 Contemporary Turkish Poets by Dedalus Poetry, Dublin.