click book
Buy
Meteorology
at
Amazon.com

Meteorology by Alpay Ulku. BOA Editions, 1999.
           
    Yusef Komunyakaa calls Meteorology an "exhilarating cloud chamber of
ideas and images," and he describes Alpay Ulku as "a master of
juxtaposition." Weather is all about juxtaposition, and sometimes Ulku's book
storms, sometimes it's bathed in a melancholy rain, sometimes it's desert
dry, and sometimes cold to the point of cracking. Ulku is an exciting poet
for me to read, but not because the book portrays mini-climates. I like it
because Ulku concerns himself with spiritual and romantic matters in an
honest study of the soul of our times, and because his poetry is simple,
powerful, lyrical, inventive, mysterious–when he communes with himself. I'm
not as happy when his poems sound like those of James Wright or Li Po, whom
he imitates in open homage, not by indirection or with apology. When he does
make himself a Ouija board for dead poets, what worked for those other men
does not work as well for Ulku–but what he himself does is good and it would
not work for them. If I have one criticism of the book, it is that the poet
should trust himself and stick to himself. To paraphrase James Wright, I want
to hear him, he has clear sounds to make.

    Letting the unconnected connect itself is the genius not of Li Po, or
Alpay Ulku, but James Wright, who puts together lines like "The big stones of
the cistern behind the barn / Are soaked in whitewash. / My grandmother's
face is a small maple leaf / Pressed in a secret box. / Locusts are climbing
down into the dark green crevices / Of my childhood. Latches click softly in
the trees. Your hair is gray." Those lines from "Twilight" never fail to
carry me off. But Ulku sometimes relies too much on the power of
juxtaposition. "Willow" begins: "It is a woman washing clothes by the
riverbank. / It is the end of a frayed rope. / It is the weave of the water
vendor's chant in the air / in my neighborhood in Istanbul, with its narrow
maze of streets. / It is a mortal that the gods had pitied, /" later
continuing with "What are you now, Po Chü-i? / It is a map of the freeways of
the City of Angels, /" and so on. These are not bad lines, but I like Ulku
much better for his better qualities, his keen eye, his lyricism, his relaxed
pacing, and most of all, his passivity. He is willing to let the world happen
to his poem, to let the world happen to him, to let the world happen. In his
wonderful poem "Three Wishes," he asks a series of questions. I can't pretend
these are the only or the best questions to be asked. There is no formal
necessity for any of them, but neither is there a forced connection of
disconnected elements. He simply opens his mind and these are the questions
that he asks.

        Would we become immortal?
        Would we walk naked through the forests
        which had been waiting all these centuries for our return?
        Would we grow wings?
        What would we do?
        What would we do with our past?
        Would we make it up to everyone we wronged,
        use those second chances we'd been letting slide?
        What would we know if we knew the future?
        Would we speak the language of streams?
        Would we bring the dodo back? The cockatrice? The magestic
            pterodactyls?
        What would we say to the Swiss Alps?
        Would we still carve sandstone into great cathedrals?
        Would we still burn witches?

    And so on. Later the poem takes an arresting, sensuous turn, but all as
naturally as Ulku asks his questions, as he addresses the age old question,
What would you do if you had three wishes? When he lets the particular way he
looks at the world weave naturally through a poem, he comes up with great
beauty. It is there in many poems, as in the poem "July," in "Meteorology,"
in "Off-Season," which begins with "What isn't for sale is closed for the
winter. The trawlers / slap against the wharf, huddled three deep, and the
men / come by to drink and talk, fiddle with their nets awhile, / not one of
them under forty." Every image in the poem which follows that mention of the
men's age serves the implied idea, which is that this little fishing village
is dying, and its way of life is dying. When he makes a more active move,
when he uses "easy" and "sweep" in the same line (like Frost), when he pays
open homage to Li Po and James Wright, using their lines and ideas, when he
baldly states a feeling "I feel sad in my stomach" or even repeats a feeling:
"It is ambrosia to . . ." or declares his endings "The Twenty-First Century
belongs to Islam," I feel less moved. Take the way "July" begins, and the way
it ends.

        The emperor's moon is an orange smudge. His sky, his heat wave.
            His dust
        is everywhere, on the leaves, over the arc lamps. On the doorsteps
people
            sit on drinking beer.
        They watch a jogger who doesn't belong there. The light turns green,
and
            a car just sits and idles.

    It ends:
        . . . A car horn blasts. A window goes down. Someone
            yells something
        about sleep. Shut up, someone replies. You go to hell. Why don't you
            come here and make me.

   

Now there is a lot of laziness in those lines, and that is exactly what I
like. As in "Three Wishes," the lines write themselves automatically and out
of a deep place within Ulku's life. And both poems end by themselves, without
either the poet or the reader having to do any work. Write a poem about a
fishing village dying and end it with "The Twenty-First Century belongs to
Islam," and I as the reader have my work cut out for me. It's too much
weather. It's global warming. It's seeding the clouds. It's the emperor's
moon, striking but unavailable. I want the real moon, the natural one Li Po
drowned trying to embrace, the autumn moon, the West River moon, the lucid
moon, the midstream moon. Likewise I want the real Ulku. I didn't get enough
of him in Meteorology. Yusef Komunyakaa calls the book "a small temple of
images that won't let us escape scot-free." Part of it is, or maybe half of
it, but I want more.

BRAD BOSTIAN is a contributing editor for ForPoetry.com.   His poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including The Alaska Quarterly Review and Rattle.

Click here to read Alpay Ulku's poems.

ForPoetry